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England make one change to their team to face Ireland
By Liam Heagney
England have made just one change to their team to play Ireland on Saturday at Aviva Stadium in round five of the Guinness Six Nations following their 23-20 home win last weekend over France. With Henry Slade pulling up with a calf injury at training on Monday, coach Eddie Jones has tweaked his midfield and left the Exeter player out.
Rather than promote regular club midfielder Ollie Lawrence from the bench, Jones has instead opted to put Elliot Daly in at outside centre alongside skipper Owen Farrell.
A regular Test full-back selection, Daly was out of luck the previous week when Jones made three changes going into their round four game versus the French, giving Max Malins his first-ever Test level start in place of the benched Daly and calling Luke Cowan-Dickie and Charlie Ewels into the pack.
Daly’s only previous start at outside centre for England came in a November 2016 win over South Africa, his other 44 starts being at full-back or wing. His recall this week is the only alteration to the XV for Dublin and his place on the bench goes to Joe Marchant, who was called into the squad at the start of the week. Marchant's inclusion is the only bench change.
The 24-year-old Harlequins player, who had a stint in 2020 playing Super Rugby for the Blues in Auckland, has four England caps. His last appearance at Test level was off the bench last November in the Autumn Nations Cup win over Georgia.
Jones said: “This is our most important game of the tournament and we want to finish well. We are anticipating a hard, tough game against Ireland and we have picked this team to cope with that. We want to take it to Ireland physically and play the rugby we want to play.”
ENGLAND (vs Ireland, Saturday)
15. Max Malins (Bristol Bears, 7 caps)
14. Anthony Watson (Bath Rugby, 50 caps)
13. Elliot Daly (Saracens, 51 caps)
12. Owen Farrell (Saracens, 92 caps) (C)
11. Jonny May (Gloucester Rugby, 65 caps)
10. George Ford (Leicester Tigers, 76 caps)
9. Ben Youngs (Leicester Tigers, 108 caps)
1. Mako Vunipola (Saracens, 66 caps)
2. Luke Cowan-Dickie (Exeter Chiefs, 30 caps)
3. Kyle Sinckler (Bristol Bears, 43 caps)
4. Maro Itoje (Saracens, 47 caps)
5. Charlie Ewels (Bath Rugby, 20 caps)
6. Mark Wilson (Newcastle Falcons, 22 caps)
7. Tom Curry (Sale Sharks, 32 caps)
8. Billy Vunipola (Saracens, 60 caps)
FINISHERS
16. Jamie George (Saracens, 58 caps)
17. Ellis Genge (Leicester Tigers, 27 caps)
18. Will Stuart (Bath Rugby, 11 caps)
19. Jonny Hill (Exeter Chiefs, 8 caps)
20. Ben Earl (Bristol Bears, 12 caps)
21. Dan Robson (Wasps, 11 caps)
22. Ollie Lawrence (Worcester Warriors, 5 caps)
23. Joe Marchant (Harlequins, 4 caps)
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Latest Comments
Like I've said before about your idea (actually it might have been something to do with mine, I can't remember), I like that teams will a small sustainable league focus can gain the reward of more consistent CC involvement. I'd really like the most consistent option available.
Thing is, I think rugby can do better than footballs version. I think for instance I wanted everyone in it to think they can win it, where you're talking about the worst teams not giving up because they are so far off the pace we get really bad scoreline when that and giving up to concentrate on the league is happening together.
So I really like that you could have a way to remedy that, but personally I would want my model to not need that crutch. Some of this is the same problem that football has. I really like the landscape in both the URC and Prem, but Ireland with Leinster specifically, and France, are a problem IMO. In football this has turned CL pool stages in to simply cash cow fixtures for the also ran countries teams who just want to have a Real Madrid or ManC to lose to in their pool for that bumper revenue hit. It's always been a comp that had suffered for real interest until the knockouts as well (they might have changed it in recent years?).
You've got some great principles but I'm not sure it's going to deliver on that hard hitting impact right from the start without the best teams playing in it. I think you might need to think about the most minimal requirement/way/performance, a team needs to execute to stay in the Champions Cup as I was having some thougt about that earlier and had some theory I can't remember. First they could get entry by being a losing quarter finalist in the challenge, then putting all their eggs in the Champions pool play bucket in order to never finish last in their pool, all the while showing the same indifference to their league some show to EPCR rugby now, just to remain in champions. You extrapolate that out and is there ever likely to be more change to the champions cup that the bottom four sides rotate out each year for the 4 challenge teams? Are the leagues ever likely to have the sort of 'flux' required to see some variation? Even a good one like Englands.
I'd love to have a table at hand were you can see all the outcomes, and know how likely any of your top 12 teams are going break into Champions rubyg on th back it it are?
Go to commentsYou always get idiots who go overboard. What else is new? I ignore them. Why bother?
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