Saracens boss Mark McCall praised his side’s performance as they stormed to victory over Sale Sharks on Friday.

The 13-3 win took Sarries ahead of Exeter to the top of the Premiership table, as Liam Williams’ single try, along with two penalties taken by Ben Spencer, made the difference at AJ Bell Stadium, while Faf de Klerk scored a penalty to give Sale their only three points of the match.

Saracens face seventh-placed Leicester next Sunday as they look to secure the Premiership title as the Six Nations resumes, with England playing Scotland on Saturday.

“In the last couple of seasons we’ve found these international windows quite difficult,” said McCall.

“We had a good win against Newcastle at home last week and to come up to Manchester is a really tough thing to do in the middle of the Six Nations with some of the personnel we’ve got missing.

“We’ve got seven games to get as many points as we can, get in to the top four and get a home semi-final.

“These two wins are going to be very important come the final shake-up.

“There were clearly areas of our game that could have been better – we had to do a lot of defending in the second half.

“Our set piece was a bit wobbly at times, but in terms of fighting for each other our defence in the last 30 minutes of the game was magnificent.”

Meanwhile Sale’s director of rugby Mark Diamond acknowledged they were not good enough on Saturday.

“We coughed the ball up too often,” he said. “Against sides like Saracens they will strangle you if you do that, and that’s what happened.

"We've won five out of our past six games in the league but we came across a very good side on Friday.

“They've shown with their defence they can close us down and we just didn't have that ability to get round it or over it or through it.

"The effort was there in bucket-loads and our defence was resilient - the one error we made early doors they scored, as good sides do.

"We knew we'd have to play well to beat them and we didn't play well enough."