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England sends world a warning

London - Ben Foden believes England's impressive 35-18 victory over Australia at Twickenham showed their World Cup rivals that Martin Johnson's side are now a significant force.

Johnson's men recovered from the frustration of a 26-16 defeat to New Zealand last weekend by racking up a record victory over the Wallabies on Saturday.

England could meet the Wallabies in the semi-finals of next year's World Cup and Foden said: "The southern hemisphere teams have to take us seriously.

"That was our main aim to put ourselves up there and make sure we're competing with the big boys.

"That's what we've gone out to do. We've put down a marker now.

"Australia beat New Zealand a couple of weeks ago, we gave the All Blacks a good run for their money and they know we're a threat.

"Australia will certainly be thinking about us come World Cup time."

England had never before scored more than 32 points against Australia and Saturday's victory margin equalled their biggest ever against the Wallabies.

And for the first time since the 2003 World Cup final England have completed back-to-back victories over Australia.

England tackle the physical Samoans next weekend and then round off their November Test campaign against South Africa and Foden knows his team can't afford to rest on their laurels.

"It was a pretty convincing win and we can be pretty happy with the sort of rugby we played," Foden said.

"Obviously this is a massive plus but we'll go back to work next week and look at ways to improve.

"We just need to keep on working because we're by no means the finished article.

"If we'd played poorly and lost this game then a lot of the hard work we'd done over the summer towards the back of the Six Nations would have been undone.

"Although we saw the All Blacks game as another step forward, a loss against Australia and it would all have been eradicated, back to square one.

"Every game we need to notch it up a little bit further and keep growing as a team. That's what's going to make us great at the end of the day.

"We're all building to the World Cup, and we've got a good squad now of 32 players who are all pushing each other so we can hit the ground running when the World Cup arrives."

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