You might say that honours were even today in the build-up to Saturday's Rugby World Cup semi-final between England and France when Brian Ashton followed Bernard Laporte's example by naming not just an unchanged XV but a 22 identical to the one that played in last weekend's quarter-final.

Ashton bristled slightly when he was asked if he had been influenced by the announcement of Laporte's selection, made earlier in the day. "I told my players yesterday evening," he said.

The surprise, if there can be one in an unchanged side, is the decision to retain Mike Catt at inside-centre and to give Andy Farrell another afternoon in the stands. All 30 members of England's squad were available for selection, and Ashton confirmed that Farrell had fully recovered from the injury that caused him to withdraw from last Saturday's starting line-up against Australia.

This, Ashton said, was another example of the "rotten luck" that has dogged Farrell since he made his £1m switch from rugby league two and a half years ago. And to be brutal about it, that probably leaves only one more chance - in either the final or the third-place play-off - for the former Wigan man to show what the 15-man game missed.

Nor is there a place for Olly Barkley, who might have worn the No12 shirt against the Wallabies had he not suffered a dead leg in training. Just as Ashton has shown his belief in Catt, with whom he worked for several years at Bath, so he has kept faith with Toby Flood, who came on for the last 18 minutes of the quarter-final and, in the words of the head coach, "handled himself well in all areas of the game - from that point of view I'm certainly happy to go with him again. It was a step up from anything he's previously done with England. He's shown a lot of potential before, but to be thrown into that cauldron and actually stand up in it as he did shows that he's there now."

And so, after beginning the tournament on the wrong foot, this group of England players continue to discover and define their collective character. Mark Regan, a veteran who has fought his way into the starting line-up, confirmed that the team's spirit has been built over the last four or five weeks - quite a contrast with the four or five years that it took Clive Woodward to create a World Cup-winning side. The trouble now is that, after using a theme of let's-show-the-bastards to power them through their last three matches, they now have the weight of their supporters' expectations on their shoulders once again.

Regan commented that it only took one look into the eyes of the Wallaby front row to know that last Saturday was going to be "a good day at the office". France are unlikely to prove such willing victims.