World netball champion Australia overcame the loss of another injured defender and completed a three-Test sweep over England, with a battling 45-41 victory on Sunday.
Off to a 6-1 start, Australia spluttered for much of the rest of the match in Sydney in front of a record crowd for an Anglo-Australian Test of just under 10,000.
In a wake-up call before they face New Zealand, the Diamonds actually trailed briefly in both the second and third quarters before edging ahead 22-20 and 32-30 by the end of those terms.
Australia snuck out to a six-goal advantage in the final quarter, but England closed to within three in the last couple of minutes.
Vice-captain Julie Corletto limped off at halftime with a corked thigh, joining fellow defenders Mo'onia Gerrard and Laura Geitz, both of whom are battling calf injuries
Corletto was on crutches after the game, but was optimist about playing in next Sunday's opening Test of three against New Zealand in Perth.
Coach Lisa Alexander was also hoping to have Geitz and Gerrard back for that game.
Young defender Amy Steel and halftime replacement Rebecca Bulley were among Australia's best.
But the Diamonds lacked fluency and turned the ball over too often in a patchy performance.
"It was certainly a wake up call for us, it's probably not such a bad thing having a game like that heading into the Test against the Kiwis," Corletto told reporters.
Australia won the first two Test by margins of 15 and 31 goals respectively, but Alexander wasn't concerned by the much closer match.
"To play out a game like that when things aren't necessarily falling your way and you can still win, to me that usually shows that there's something more to improve on and we should be playing better by next week," Alexander told reporters.
"I think we have to pay our respects to our opponents today. We may have been slightly off, there's no doubt about that, but England were certainly switched on and were very aggressive in their defence and we were a little bit slow on the uptake adjusting to that."
She felt her team showed character to win despite not playing well.
"That's when you see who stands up in the heat of competition and that's the ideal preparation moving into New Zealand really in a lot of respects," Alexander said.
"One of our targets was to crush England today, but it didn't work out that way.
"The interesting thing is we can look at it very closely now and just fine tune a few things that we know we need to do that have to be done against the Silver Ferns."
Captain Catherine Cox led Australia's scorers with 23 goals from 27 attempts despite spending some time off court following an accidental clash with England captain Jade Clarke.
