Scott Murray is getting to know his teammates after a week of hard

I WON'T be playing in the first game of the tour and I don't think any of the Scottish lads will. But, as in any tour, the first two games will be used to get as many people playing as possible - so we're not sure exactly what will happen the rest of the time.

But two squads for the two opening games have already been picked. And myself, Tom Smith and Simon Taylor are all in the second one.

The competition among the other lock forwards down at the camp at Tylney Hall, Hampshire, has been fierce but friendly. I'm rooming with Jeremy Davidson at the moment and we'll be playing in the second game together so we've been getting on quite well, and I've also met his countryman Malcolm O'Kelly before, when I was out in Ireland playing against him.

Obviously I've played with Danny Grewcock this year at Saracens - and Martin Johnson is just Martin Johnson. He's actually a very smart guy and I'm just trying to learn as much as possible from him.

The first week of training has been tough, but it has also gone really well. We came together last Saturday at three o'clock and picked up all our kit and had a chat about how Graham Henry wants to play the game. Then on the Monday we started training - we started at nine in the morning and didn't finish until nine o'clock at night.

That gruelling period was basically made up of two rugby sessions and two impact sessions, and it was all planned to try and get the squad knitted together as quickly as possible.

This has been vital, because although I know a lot of the English players competitively, it's never really been more than a case of just saying hello to them. This means that although the England boys have got pretty good banter with there being so many of them, the rest of it hasn't really started yet - it is just starting to kick off now.

There hasn't been all that much made of the fact that only three out of the 37-man tour squad are Scots, although obviously the guys have joked about it a wee bit. But England were always going to have a lot of players here because they've beaten Australia and that's what we're hoping to do now. Of alI the players that I've met up with this week, I think that Rob Henderson has made the biggest impression on me. He seems like a very funny guy, and he's really easy to speak to.

I also think my Scotland teammate Simon Taylor seems to have come out of his shell a little bit. Perhaps because playing for Scotland in the Six Nations is always a bit of battle just to get playing, somehow I've never really managed to get to know him that well.

Blackboard sessions have helped everyone gel together. You had to go up there and say your dislikes and likes, what motivates you and stuff like that, then you had to give your own motto - representing how you go through life - to try to let people know what you're all about.

Then there were the physical challenges. To make sure we all worked together, we were told to climb up a structure to about 100ft in the air and jump off, or try to grab on to poles and stuff like that. Sceptical as I was at the start, playing in a percussion band was also good fun. We split up into three groups and had to come together. Although I'm not very good at musical instruments it worked out quite well. We even managed a decent tune in the end.

We did similar things before we went out to New Zealand with the Scotland team under McGeechan but this time they tried to change the session to make sure we weren't just repeating things we had done before. The physical exercises and blackboard sessions were all different from the ones we were doing at Windermere.

In terms of the social scene, training over the past couple of days has been so intense that it's only been half an hour here and half an hour there for lunch, before all the guys have been heading back into the rooms to get some sleep in.

But on Wednesday night, we had a few beers in the pub and played some drinking games, even if the squad all knew they had a big session next day and that they couldn't overdo it.

But the staff are all quite flexible with regard to drinking. Some guys in the squad like to go out and have a few beers and believe they play better for it.

So what the bosses have said so far is: 'If that's what you do when you're playing for Saracens or whoever then that's what you'll do when you're here'.

All that they want is to get the best out of you.

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