England approach was key to Poland win: Owen

England adopted an old-fashioned approach to beat Poland 2-1 and top their World Cup qualifying group, according to their captain Michael Owen.

England harried the Poles, who have also qualified for the finals, into submission with goals from Owen and Frank Lampard on Wednesday.

"We played like a real English team. We closed them down, tackled, ran a lot and I felt we played well," said Owen, who was captain in place of the suspended David Beckham.

"I felt a bit hard done by going in at one each, because we felt they hadn't done a lot and didn't have many shots on goal. Thankfully, Frank popped up and scored a cracking goal to get the winner."

Owen's 44th-minute strike equalled Gary Lineker's England record of 22 competitive goals.

"Gary was my biggest hero when I was a kid and I spoke to him earlier about it," Owen added.

"It was nice to equal his record and hopefully I can beat it before too long, I will have to wait for the World Cup finals though.

"It would be great to go there having won all our warm-up games and having scored a lot of goals, but even if we don't we stand a good chance."

Striker Wayne Rooney said England had answered their critics, who castigated manager Sven-Goran Eriksson when his side lost to Northern Ireland last month, by completing their aim of winning Group Six.

"At the start of the group stages the main thing was to qualify and we topped the group so we did everything we had to," Rooney said.

"Poland are a good side if you look at the results they had in the group and we played well against them on both occasions.