Under Eriksson's charge here, Britain won a total of 38 medals 12 of which were gold, to surpass their previous best totals in Assen in 2006 and Lille in 2002 and finish joint third in the medal table alongside Brazil and just behind China and Russia respectively.

But Eriksson, widely regarded as one of the greatest Paralympic coaches in the world, has refused to get excited as he insisted that Britain must continue to improve if they want to produce similar results at their home Paralympics.

"We've had hugely successful Championships and dramatically improved from our 18th place team finish in the Beijing Paralympics two years ago," Eriksson, who took over the British team shortly after the Beijing Games in 2008, told insideworldparasport.

"Most of our experienced athletes have continued to deliver medals at the highest level while our junior athletes who came to get experience of high quality competition, have proved that, while Rio 2016 may be their realistic target, London 2012 is very much a possibility.

"However, we cannot just sit there and rest on our laurels.

"We must continue to improve and we must continue to be tough on athletes that are not performing.

"We put a lot of pressure in the athletes and their coaches coming out here.

"I said to them, 'If you don't perform here at the World Championships, you are putting your funding in jeopardy big time.'

"I made it very clear that if anyone wanted to be part of the team going forward and into 2012, they had to medal and prove they can produce at this level.

"I said before we came out here that there were no excuses and that we had to step it up.

"To their credit, the team really did step up it up with very few exceptions."

Eriksson added that he now expects to see Britain start converting the large amount of silver and bronze medals they won into golds by the time they get to London 2012."

"A problem for me is that we won a lot of bronze medals here - we got 17 of them," he said.

"We also won nine silver medals.

"The message to the bronze and silver medallists is that they have got to keep improving to turn that into gold for 2012.

"The message to the gold medallists is perhaps even harder as they have got to maintain that performance and work even harder to increase that gap over the chasing pack as everyone is after them.

"I must say that I'm very pleased with how we have done here but I know that we can improve and that we must improve to be where we want to be at London 2012."

Contact the writer of this story at [email protected]