The Azzurri embarrassed England in 2017 by exploiting a loophole in the laws as they stood between scrum-half Danny Care and fly-half George Ford.
In what would normally be offside, the cunning Italians instead never formed a ruck, so there was NO offside line — which absolutely stumped Eddie Jones’ clueless men.
SunSport columnist James Haskell, who was playing in the 36-15 win, even asked ref Romain Poite to help him with the rules — only to be told: “I can’t say, I’m the referee, I’m not a coach.”
But England want Italy to head to London with more magic, with just two games of the Six Nations left and only four World Cup warm-ups before Japan.
Defence coach John Mitchell said: “They’ll come with something, there is no doubt about that. Let’s hope they come with something positive.
“There’s a big tournament down the road and we haven’t got too many minutes left before then.
“We have to adapt to different challenges and whatever comes next weekend, we have to be ready for.
“That law situation has been dealt with. At the end of the day, you want people to attack you in a positive way — and history is definitely part of our analysis.
"We do look back. It is important to look at history. One of the things that sticks in the mind is ‘expect the unexpected’.
“That creates a challenge to be alert and to understand the implications of what that ‘unexpected’ might be and make sure that we can prepare as well as we can for those unexpected situations.”
Scrum-half Ben Youngs was on the bench in 2017 until England fixed the chaos and recalled: “It certainly caused us some problems.
“We were the first to come up against that sort of strategy through the whole game.
“I remember watching and realising there was not an actual lot you could do.
“They made a semi-circle around you, you’ve got nowhere to pass and if you pick and go, you’re back to where you started.
“Guy tackles, stays out, circle stays the same . . . it was interesting, yeah.
“If you passed it in any direction you got intercepted. It was bizarre. You just had to try to create a tackle.
“If you did manage to create a tackle and got quick ball, they were all offside so it could change in a blink.
“It was certainly tactically different and smart by them.
“And it paid us a compliment in the way they came up with that because they went so far out of the box to stop us doing anything.”
The chance of a Grand Slam might have gone but fans will still expect a cricket score on Saturday.
And Kiwi Mitchell added: “We’ve got standards and expectations that individuals in the team have to meet. Maintaining those standards and expectations is critical.”
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