Caroline Phillips spent two days with the English rugby squad, watching the tension mount as Will Carling’s gentle giants gear up for tomorrow’s big game.

Wednesday, 1pm at the four-star Petersham Hotel (£110 a night for shared twin rooms), second home this week for the England rugger squad. On the reception desk a notice reads: ‘Signed Copies of Will Carling’s Captain’s Diary on sale’. Outside, a blue BMW has a side painted with the legend: ‘Mike Teague. Good luck in the Final.’

Having spent the morning training with the rest of the squad, Jeremy Guscott, a superstar and black model with a lovely manner, comes down whiffing of Paco Rabanne aftershave. He has kindly eyes, and looks relaxed all in navy and Docksiders. ‘I feel fairly relaxed,’ he concedes. Guscott, like the other players, wants the rest of Wednesday to be low key. ‘I’m going to see something called Commitments at the cinema, back at 10.30 and into bed with some hot chocolate.’

He’s sharing a room with wing Simon Halliday. ‘That’s the tradition. Only the bigger dudes, like the captain, get their own room,’ says Guscott. ‘I wouldn’t like a room on my own.’

A just-showered Rob Andrew walks past, in jeans and genial. So much for rugger bugger oafishness. Like the rest of the squad, he has a kind and calm mentality.

‘No nerves yet,’ he says. ‘You need to stay relaxed and detach yourself from the media excitement.’ Certainly there is a sense of camaraderie – these are guys who have been together as a group for two and a half years – and no real nervousness in the air. You could even read the mood as confident.

The players go to eat in the private dining room, a place where they sit in tables of eight and 10. ‘We like them to eat pasta and jacket potatoes, to put some of the petrol back in the tank,’ says team manager Geoff Cooke. Twenty-four hours before play, they are discouraged from eating red meat because of its long digestive process. Dean Richards, a policeman in life and a player who is ‘on the bench’ as they say (in the reserves), has managed his baked potato plus a melon, salmon, coleslaw and two large wedges of Black Forest gateau.

It’s 2.30. Will Carling, with dimpled chin and a red apple in one hand and a mobile phone in the other, is excited. But he’s showing signs of strain and pressure. He has non-stop interviews all afternoon and looks frazzled.

‘I’m going to get to bed by 10 tonight,’ he says. ‘I’ll just have a meal this evening and a chat.’ With whom? ‘With all the boys.’

Now the chaps are in the team room taking it easy and watching New Zealand versus Scotland. It’s a room full of balls and things to sign for charity. They’ll have to sign several hundred before Saturday. It’s 4.30. A lot of the players have said they wanted to play golf in the afternoon. But the light is going. Certainly, the lads have long periods of boredom. Some try to relieve it by going for a curry in the evening. And they all claim to miss their womenfolk.

It’s 7.30 and Jeremy Guscott, Richard Hill, Nigel Redman, Brian Moore and Rory Underwood are in a side room laughing and playing what looks to be Scrabble. ‘It’s called Take Three,’ explains Simon Halliday, who is also a stockbroker with Phillips and Drew. ‘You take three letters and try to make a word out of it, which means the game moves along very quickly.’ Upstairs, players are playing pool. They all say killing time is difficult in the last few days.

At 8.30 there is chicken and ice-cream for dinner in the hotel. Coach Roger Uttley is appearing on Sportsnight and also has a French television appearance. The players take the mickey, as they call it, and say the French will probably understand him more easily than BBC viewers.

Dean Richards, Gary Rees, Gary Pearce and Simon Hodgkinson go out for a Chinese meal. They talk about rugby. Most of the players go straight to their rooms after dinner. By 10 o’clock, the hotel is dead.

Thursday. No one appears until 7.45am. The change in mood is palpable. Tension has built up overnight. Today, they are training in a closed session. And then a dozen of them are going to Wentworth for a private game of golf.

It’s a free afternoon. Some will go back to do weight training. The rest will be lazing around the hotel. At 7pm, they have a meeting to go through what happened in the training session.

Simon Halliday appears at 8.30 with the FT under his arm. He went to his bedroom at 9.30pm to watch a thriller video, then to bed at midnight. ‘You don’t go to bed too early or you don’t sleep well.’

How does he feel? ‘OK. But you always feel tired in hotels.’ Jeremy Guscott says he watched Sportsnight and boxing on the television, and then went to sleep at midnight.

Will Carling walks past. He seems tense and distracted. The players have started to focus on the game. ‘This is the sort of build-up you’d expect,’ says Rory Underwood, who spent the latter part of the previous evening watching a film in bed and is now off to have some Alpen. He and fullback Jonathan Webb do not look happy.

Today, Friday, they have a similar day: breakfast, team meeting, training, lunch and afternoon free. The only difference is that things are even more tense. God, what will it be like tomorrow?