Ahead of last year’s clash at the Millennium Stadium, Foden said England needed to put Wales in their place and was again full of fighting talk despite the Red Rose heading in as underdogs.

While both teams boast two wins from their opening two matches, Wales’ victories came in far more convincing fashion against Ireland and Scotland.

And Foden accepts that after scraping past Scotland andItaly, Wales will represent the truest test of Stuart Lancaster’s new-look side’s credentials.

He said: "Any team that can beat this Welsh side in this form puts down a massive marker.

"Wales must be considered one of the top three or four teams in the world. If you can beat them in this competition with so much at stake it'll give us the boost of confidence to really take it to the next teams we play.

"We have massive belief we can do big things in this competition … we're confident we can go and win the title.

“To beat the favourites and be three from three would put us in a good situation but the same can be said for them. It's a big crunch game.

"First and foremost we want to make Twickenham a fortress. They're going to have a difficult afternoon ... we've done a lot of work on areas we can exploit and areas where we think they're going to attack us. “We've used our fallow week very wisely in terms of analysing them. Hopefully we will cause a few surprises this weekend."

Wales back-row trio of Dan Lydiate, Sam Warburton and Toby Faletau, so impressive in the World Cup, are reunited at Twickenham and will face off against captain Chris Robshaw, making his home debut at Rugby HQ, and Scarlets’ Ben Morgan, who is starting his first international.

And despite England’s relative inexperience in that department, Foden is confident they can stand toe to toe with their much vaunted opponents.

"We need to get our back-row into the game as well,” he said. “If we're chopping these guys down before the gain line we can really utilise that sort of field position. We will definitely be looking to take it to them at the weekend.

"In the last two weeks we've been working hard on our attack ... we want to expose them and challenge them defensively and we're confident that our defence can shut them down."