England showed off their 2025 Women's Rugby World Cup favourites tag with a dismantling of chief rivals New Zealand.

The 24-12 win at Saracens at Twickenham came a little more than a year out from the tournament final, running in four tries without ever hitting full stride.

It was a 17th consecutive victory for the Red Roses with tries coming from Marlie Packer, Abby Dow, Ellie Kildunne and Natasha Hunt.

And the victory, which came with three ex-Welwyn juniors coming off the bench - Hannah Botterman, Zoe Harrison and Helena Rowland, was the perfect way for the team to sign off before heading to Canada for the defence of their WXVI title.

One of the positives though, according to head coach John Mitchell, was the reminder that you have to put good teams to the sword when you are on top, like they were at 24-0 to the good.

“When you’ve got the foot on the throat, finish it,” he said.

“Our discipline in the last 20 metres of the field let them off the hook. We had them exactly where we wanted them.

“We didn’t get momentum like we normally do. New Zealand did a good job there. For us there’s some key learnings in how we get momentum against New Zealand.

“New Zealand will continue to play the way they do, it’s just in their DNA. We knew that was going to come.

“We gave them some possession and some soft tries. All of our down doing, which was good because for the last World Cup we didn’t get these kinds of lessons at this time of year. It’s really good for you.

“It was a satisfying performance. We went through a patchy start and then built some really good pressure and unstructured play."