England's Maro Itoje celebrates winning the match Photo: PHOTOSPORT
A dominant England scored seven tries to crush Italy 47-24 at Twickenham in a chaotic match and maintain their outside hopes of winning the Six Nations championship.
First-half tries by Tom Willis, Tommy Freeman and Ollie Sleightholme had them 21-17 up at halftime and Marcus Smith, Tom Curry, Sleightholme and Ben Earl crossed in the second, with flyhalf Fin Smith landing six of his seven conversion attempts.
Italy showed much more spirit on Sunday than in their 73-24 humbling by France two weeks ago and scored three excellent tries but never really threatened England making it 32 wins out of 32 in the fixture.
England travel to Cardiff next Saturday with the chance to win four games in the championship for the first time since lifting the title in 2020, but even a bonus-point victory is unlikely to be enough to finish top of the table this time.
After their impressive win in Dublin on Saturday France lead the way on 16 points, England have 15 and Ireland 14.
France's huge points difference of plus-106 to England's plus-20 means that any sort of victory in their final game against Scotland in Paris will almost certainly secure the honours. England can get to 20 points with a bonus-point victory in Cardiff and would then need the Scots to do them a favour.
Ireland will expect to win in Italy and can get to 19 with a bonus-point but their hopes of a third successive title look extremely slim. "We wanted to free ourselves up and put some scores on the board," said man of the match lock Ollie Chessum. "We always want to score points but have found that difficult in the last couple of games. The coaches allowed us to be free.
"We just have to take care of what we can next week, Wales away is always a massive game down there."
England started with ambition as Elliot Daly ran a deep kick back in contrast to the safety-first kick returns against Scotland and it paved the way for Willis to crash over for the first try after four minutes.
The man Daly replaced at 15, Marcus Smith, was into the action after eight minutes for injured centre Ollie Lawrence, in at fullback with Daly moving into midfield.
The shuffle left England looking confused in defence and Italy took advantage with their first attack of the game after 15 minutes as Monty Ioane's chip was touched down by Ange Capuozzo.
England took control again though and scored again when Freeman made it four tries in four games when he cashed in on a probing Daly kick.
Again though England opened the door with some terrible defending to allow Capuozzo to blast through and gift the supporting Ross Vintcent a second Italian try.
Sleightholme then scored England,s third to put them four points ahead at halftime after a Paolo Garbisi penalty.
A crowd-pleasing sidestep by prop Will Stuart made a hole for Marcus Smith to make up for his earlier missed tackle with England's bonus-point clinching fourth try.
Tom Curry bundled over for the fifth and remarkable handling by Maro Itoje, Ben Curry and hooker Jamie George, on his 100th England appearance, sent Sleightholme over for his second score of the match. Fin Smith converted all six - most from the tryline, to underline another remarkably mature display at flyhalf.
There was still almost half an hour to play at that point but, amid the usual raft of replacements, England lost their way and Italy claimed their first score of the half through Tommaso Menoncello after 70 minutes.
The hosts had the final word however as Earl cashed in on a turnover to score in the final minute.
- Reuters
