England squad update: Harry Randall among four players released
Steve Borthwick has cut four players from his Guinness Six Nations squad for next Saturday’s round three match in Scotland, releasing them for A team duty on Sunday versus Portugal in Leicester.
The England head coach had confirmed that a squad of 36 on Sunday evening would meet for two days of senior team training at Pennyhill Park, including Harry Randall for the injured No9 Alex Mitchell and the fit-again midfielder Ollie Lawrence at the expense of his uncapped Bath teammate Will Muir.
However, while Lawrence has been kept on ahead of Thursday's team announcement for the championship game in Edinburgh, Randall’s stay at Pennyhill was short-lived.
He will now reroute to George Skivington’s A team at Loughborough University ahead of England’s first match at that level since the 2016 Saxons tour to South Africa.
The decision means that Danny Care and Ben Spencer will be the two scrum-halves named in Borthwick's match day 23 to face Scotland following the knee injury suffered by the first-choice Mitchell.
Also joining Randall in the switch from Pennyhill to Loughborough will be Charlie Ewels, Joe Heyes and Max Ojomoh, as they have also been released for A team duty following first-team training.
Randall had originally been named in the squad of 27 last Thursday for the A game, but the emergence of Mitchell's injury saw the Bristol No9 start his week with Borthwick's first-team squad.
The further addition to the A squad of the already Borthwick-omitted Muir will increase the number of players Skivington now has with him for the Mattioli Woods Welford Road fixture to 31.
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Claims that Finau is a risky proposition are hyperbole. His tackles have been mostly perfectly timed and executed except for the Lynach one and that was a split-second out, certainly not 2 seconds. Social media criticism shows opposition fans are nervous about Finau’s impact. I see Jacobson and Blackadder as no.7s, they don’t have the power, size or dynamism to be 6 or 8 at Test level. Akira has shown he lacks the intuition and technique to play Tests. If he learnt to bend his back more and hit breakdowns and tackles low and hard, it would do wonders for his game. Finau is the standout option for 6 with Grace or Shields as his backup. I’d like to see Finau, Sotutu and Jacobson as an experimental back-row combo; lineout nous, dynamic ball carrying, hard defence, etc.
Go to commentsI find these articles so very interesting, giving a much more in depth series of insights than one can ever gain from “desktop” research. It is very significant that it is this English man that Joe Schmidt has turned to build the basement stability and reliability from the WB forwards that was so shredded during the Jones debacle. With his long period in Ireland, with both Leinster and Ireland, Schmidt will know Geoff Parling’s qualities as a player well, and he will have gone over, with a fine tooth comb, the mans time in Australia. This, one feels, will prove to be a shrewd decision. I’m particularly interested in Parling’s comments about the lineout, especially the differences in approach between the hemispheres. He talks about the impact of weather conditions on the type of lineout tactics employed. He is the right man to have preparing for a wet and windy game at Eden Park, the “Cake Tin”, or in Christchuch, or for that matter in Capetown. I must confess to being surprised by this comment though re Will Skelton: “ Is he a lineout jumper? No. But the lineout starts on the ground – contact work, lifting, utilising that massive body at the maul.” Geoff is spot on about the work Will does on the ground. But I would contest the view that he is not a lineout jumper. I think I have commented before on this one, so won’t go further than referring to the end of the last Cup Final in Dublin, LAR using Will on maybe 3 occasions at No 2 in the lineout. And I have seen him used by LAR in Top 14, and never seen him beaten to the catch…but in reality that would only be a total of 10 times max.
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