I'm don't specialize in auctions, but this sounds wrong. A second-price auction and an English auction are strategically equivalent in most formal models.

I should have been clearer by 'all-around'; I meant that the incentives are lined up correctly, the costs are lower (every person only needs to submit one bid, and does not need to expend any effort monitoring the auction), gets exact results without requiring massive numbers of bids, and more information is conveyed by the end of the auction.