SCOTLAND assistant coach Nathan Hines believes that England could find the pressure of going for a record 18th consecutive Test win “paralysing” when the sides meet at Twickenham on Saturday.

Victory over Italy in their last Six Nations Championship outing made it 17 wins in a row for Eddie Jones’s side, just one short of the All Blacks’ record for a leading international side. Lifting the Calcutta Cup then completing another Grand Slam by defeating Ireland would therefore make England sole record-holders with 19 wins - but Hines can recall from his own playing days in France when a winning streak became a burden.

“When I was at Clermont we had a run of 77 wins in a row at home,” he said yesterday. “That is a burden sometimes. The pressure of ‘Am I going to be part of the team that loses this record?’ - that can be paralysing at times.

“You went into a game thinking ‘I don’t want to be a part of that team’. My experience was that you knew there was more expectation, more pressure. You knew a loss was probably coming, but you didn’t know when.”

The pressure on England in their last outing came largely from the Italians’ opting not to contest the ruck - a tactic that meant they could swarm around the breakdown instead of observing the usual offside line, and that left Dylan Hartley and colleagues scratching their heads for the first half. Hines declined to explain precisely how Scotland will contest the breakdown, although the fact that England eventually learned to deal with the Italians’ ploy is likely to mean it will not be used consistently by anyone else for a while.

“As for how many men we put in, I don’t know,” the assistant coach said. “The thing that Italy did, it forces coaches and players to think differently at the breakdown.

“So well done to Italy for chucking that in the mix. Now it forces every other team to say: ‘Well, if this happens, what are we going to do about it?’ That’s not a bad thing.

“It’s a surprising plan, obviously. More surprising for England than anyone else.

“But I think they sorted it out. They obviously know the rule now – so that’s good.

“This is what happens when people try to push the laws: they find a little loophole people weren’t aware of. It then gets tidied up and teams are wise to it. It just means it attracts everyone’s attention, which is good.

“Would any other team in the world have done better at adapting to that? It was a pretty unorthodox thing to come up against - it does take a bit of time to work out what’s going on. They dealt with it in the second half.”

Scotland have won at Twickenham since 1983, but there is one member of the current squad who has a 100 per cent record there thanks to a victory eight years ago in the English Schools Cup final. And Huw Jones is sure that winning that match can help him prepare for Saturday’s Calcutta Cup clash, even if he was just a teenage scrum-half back then.

“I played in the 2009 Under-15 Cup final for Millfield against Judd School from Tonbridge,” the centre said yesterday. “We got a good win.

“I didn’t manage to get on the score sheet. I was playing scrum-half, and I’ve got the

medal at home somewhere.

“That was massive to win that and play there. It was all the under-15 and under-18s Vase and Cup finals, one after the other, so there was a fairly big crowd, maybe a couple of thousand.”

There will be around 40 times that attendance for this weekend’s Six Nations Championship, but Jones sees no reason why he and the rest of the Scotland squad should feel intimidated either by the venue or the occasion or the fact that they have not won at Twickenham for so long. After all, they had not won their first game in the Championship since 2006 - but they still beat Ireland at Murrayfield. And they had not managed to defeat Wales since 2007, but got the better of the Welsh too 10 days ago.

“Going into a game where it is uncharted territory, you haven’t won down there before, that can have a negative effect,” he said. “A lot of what we’ve done recently has changed that mindset.

“We believe we can win tight games against opposition we haven’t beaten before. Going into this game the guys will be quite positive about it.

“It’s an exciting opportunity. Breaking these small records definitely has an effect. It gives you more belief as you go on that you can keep going and breaking these runs.

“I think traditionally, not just England but other teams too might have gone into the Six Nations thinking Scotland might be an easy game. Over the last couple of years and this season especially I think we’ve managed to change that mindset. Going down there I don't think they’ll be thinking this is going to be an easy game.

“The 34 years thing has not been spoken about much really. Obviously that was before quite a few of us were even around, so I think this is a different era, different team and I don't think we need to think much about that. It won't affect us, that sort of stat.”