SARACENS are in town on Saturday and it will be great to come up against my brother Alex.

First and foremost my brother is my best mate. We are a close family and he and I are very close. We speak most days and we are always encouraging each other.

It's been a difficult period for him over the last 18 months because he has had a lot of problems with different injuries.

I take an awful lot of pleasure from him playing again because he has had some dark moments.

But, in some ways, I wish he was making his comeback next week because he's playing well.

He's had a long lay-off and has come back with renewed vigour. He seems to be playing pretty well at the moment and he's certainly playing very abrasively.

We both play in the back row but it has been a long time since we played against each other. We've missed each other quite a few times with injuries and I don't think we've come up against each other since he was at Sale.

We played a fair amount of schools rugby together and we played for England together against America in Los Angeles and he was captaining me.

It's great to play with your brother. There's no better feeling and it's something we'd love to do again for England.

But we won't go looking for each other in Saturday's match. The game has moved on from the days when you can have personal battles. It's much faster and there's more fluidity. If you start concentrating on anything like that you can lose your way in the game.

But I'm sure if the occasion arises that he should hurt me or vice- versa there will be no love lost and it will give us something to talk about after the game.

Sunday's match at London Irish was an interesting game. I don't think we've got started yet in terms of what we actually want to do with the ball -- the patterns aren't there.

I think in that respect we've still got a fair amount to do, but the result was very pleasing.

But just as pleasing as the result was the manner in which the guys battled it out, which was hugely important. It's something we prided ourselves on last year and it's not something you can take for granted.

When you start a campaign you don't know how everybody is going to come together, how they are going to battle, how they are going to fight.

But it seems we've got a fair am-ount of tightness in the squad again, which is great. It's something we can build on but we need to be a bit more precise.

We always felt it was a game which was there to be won and it was only some of our mistakes which allowed them to score.

We thought that if we implemented what we wanted to implement we could win it and I think we just about did enough.

It was a frantic last few minutes but the lads stuck to their guns and kept them out and that is something that gives you great heart.

I was sin-binned in the last minute and I found it incredibly hard. It's not a nice feeling and you want to go out and contribute but I think most of the guys didn't even realise I had gone off.