Shane Geraghty helped London Irish back to the top of the Guinness Premiership with a thumping 48-8 victory over Newcastle and enhanced his case for a call-up to England's Six Nations squad .

Geraghty is now fully fit after injury and has made a timely return to form as fellow England fly-halves Danny Cipriani, of London Wasps, and Leicester's Toby Flood are not firing on all cylinders.

Toby Booth, the Irish director of rugby, was full of praise for Geraghty, whose brilliant display came in front of England attack coach Brian Smith. "For me, that is the best Shane has played this season," said Booth. "He brought his game control, together with the individual brilliance he has. Shane asked a lot of questions of Newcastle in attack."

Irish needed to raise their game after a disappointing 16-13 loss to Saracens and produced a performance that exposed the glaring weaknesses in the Newcastle ranks.

"I'm absolutely delighted with the response of the players from last Saturday," said Booth. "The mark of any side who want to compete for the play-offs is how they react to a poor performance.

"We like to play in every area of the pitch and we adopt systems which enable us to do that. We like to play with ball in hand."

"The IRB have made the laws so difficult to referee and the game is immeasurably worse than it was 12 months ago."