KEY POINTS:
PARIS - England coach Brian Ashton broke his own rule about not singling out individual players when he praised the contribution of two-try winger Paul Sackey in England's 36-20 Pool A win over Tonga on Friday.
Sackey followed up his double in last week's win over Samoa with
two opportunist scores in the first half, both at key times when England were under pressure.
His first came when he showed great awareness and good handling to collect a Jonny Wilkinson kick into the corner while the Tongan defence were expecting a shot at goal. The second followed a scorching 80 metres sprint after he scooped up a loose pass as Tonga were pressing.
"He's being doing that for a while but It's great to see him bring it on to the international stage when he gets the opportunity," Ashton told a news conference.
"But it's not only the work he does when he's put into the clear, I thought he also did some work in some pretty heavy traffic tonight.
"He's a lot stronger than he looks, he can let support players get to him, he tackled well and I thought he had a pretty good all-round game this evening,"
Captain Martin Corry was similarly impressed by the Wasps man, who arrived at the World Cup as a fringe player after making his debut last November.
"If you look at his two tries today...we were under the cosh and it's very special when you have a finisher who can get an opportunity and take it," said Corry.
"That crossfield kick was a sign of a team which is really growing in confidence, you see an opportunity and you take it.
"For his second try he needed to be in the right place to take those sort of chances."
Ashton was delighted his team had scored four tries for the second successive game after they had looked so blunt in their first two matches but warned against getting carried away.
"We know we didn't put in the perfect performance and at times we were under pressure," he said.
"But two weeks ago, according to some people, we were down and out of the tournament but the players have pulled together and now we are in the quarter-finals."
England will face Australia in Marseille next weekend and Ashton said there was no reason why they could not beat their old World Cup rivals.
"When you get into a knockout stage on any day any team could probably beat any other," he said. "We take some confidence from winning two games but we know we are not playing to our potential.
"We are slowly moving along the road towards that but will have to go up a gear at least from tonight."
Corry agreed that this is a different England team from the one who were swept aside 36-0 by South Africa.
"We are a developing side, both performances have been improvements on the last," he said.
"The exciting thing is that there is also an element of we don't know how good we can be.
"From where we were two weeks ago we've improved across the board, but need to improve across the board again."
- REUTERS