Steve Borthwick insists that England have vindicated their pre-Rugby World Cup plans by seeing off Samoa to complete a clean sweep of Pool D.
Head coach Borthwick conceded that off-colour England were too scrappy amid their 18-17 victory over Samoa in Lille.
Danny Care’s late score dragged a messy England kicking and screaming to a fourth straight World Cup win.
Now England are likely to face Fiji in the quarter-finals, where they will launch a revenge mission after their 30-22 loss to the Pacific Islanders in August.
Borthwick responded to the patchy one-point victory over Samoa by hitting out at England’s detractors who had warned against an abortive World Cup campaign after three defeats in four warm-up matches.
“I said all the way through that the team will be ready for September 9 and the team was ready for September 9 and has continued to build,” said Borthwick.
“There have been many times where these players have been written off quite badly. Ultimately there were many people who said this team would not get out of the group stages and the team has progressed.
“The character of these men is outstanding and they follow this man next to me, who is an example.
“The big players perform on the big stages and they’re all looking forward to next Sunday in Marseille.”
England were again out of kilter when attempting to move the ball, though there were patches of impressive attacking play.
The Red Rose men are far too lax at the breakdown on both sides of the ball, and England know full well that any repeat in the quarter-final will see them sent home.
“We’re trying to expedite things very fast here,” said Borthwick. “We’ve had the coaching team together for this World Cup preparation period.
“We have combinations we want to play and work together. There are some combinations we haven’t been able to run very much recently.
“We are learning from every minute of every game and every minute of training because that’s what we need to do.
“The performance is not what we wanted today, you’ve seen an England team that's worked to improve consistently.”
Owen Farrell suffered the indignity of having a penalty ruled out due to failing to strike the ball within the 60-second shot clock limit.
The basic mistake proved symptomatic of another error-strewn England showing, that will ultimately not be sufficient for the Red Rose side to make a tangible dent in this tournament.
“I didn’t see the clock, I wasn’t aware,” said Farrell. “It was above where I was picking my target. I got lost a little bit in the kick.
“It wasn’t good enough and I’m glad for the team’s sake that it didn’t cost us. Hopefully it doesn’t happen again.
“A big credit to Samoa and how they came out firing. They put us under pressure at times.
“There will be loads of stuff that we can do better than that, which we’ll watch over.
“I’m glad with the fight that we showed towards the end, with finding the try and scrambling back so that Samoa did not score, too.”
