Wilkinson recovers in time for French

Martin Johnson was due to name his starting XV overnight, but Wilkinson has shaken off an elbow injury and was expected to be selected at No 10 ahead of Toby Flood, who replaced him in the last-gasp 16-12 win over Andy Robinson’s side at Eden Park in Auckland on Saturday.

Meanwhile, Tom Palmer has urged England to prey on France’s mental fragility in Saturday’s Rugby World Cup quarter-final. The England lock has spent the last two years playing for Stade Francais and understands the French psyche better than anyone in Johnson’s squad. France, who lost to Tonga last weekend, appear to be in a state of disarray, with coach Marc Lievremont openly criticising his players and vice versa.

Comparisons have been drawn between Lievremont’s squad and the French football team, who went on strike at the 2010 World Cup after Nicolas Anelka was sent home. The French players are understood to have held a summit meeting yesterday in a bid to bring a sense of unity to the squad ahead of the clash with England.

Palmer believes that could make them dangerous – but he also knows how damaging a fast start from England could be to their belief. “From my knowledge of French guys and what their psyches are like, it tends to be that if things don’t go their way or things aren’t going too well they do make quite a lot out of it,” said Palmer. “It happens to the French. Look at their football team in the World Cup as well. In my experience, especially my first season in France at Stade, we weren’t particularly mentally strong as a group and if things started to go wrong then we folded fairly easily.

“You can just feel when in your team, people aren’t supporting you, people aren’t talking, people just go missing a little bit. But France will be hugely committed to this match. They’ll see this as another chance. Things haven’t gone too well, they lost two games in the pool, but they are still in a quarter-final. All that’s come before them is kind of irrelevant now because it’s kind of a one-off match. It would be foolish of us to think they lost to Tonga they’ll lose again. They’ll raise their game for us.”

Palmer made a telling contribution off the bench against Scotland, but knows England need to improve drastically. “I think there is more to come from England. The best we’ve played in the whole period was that [warm-up] game against Ireland and we need to go and replicate that.”