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'He is one of those players that didn't have the escalator through the pathway... he's a fighter'
By Liam Heagney
Mark Wilson has been on the receiving end of huge praise from Eddie Jones following his recall to the starting England team for Saturday's Guinness Six Nations round one encounter versus Scotland at Twickenham.
Jones' preferred back row trio is Tom Curry and Sam Underhill packing down with Billy Vunipola and with Underhill absent for the start of this latest England campaign due to a hip injury, Wilson edged ahead of Ben Earl and Jack Willis in the selection battle to fill the vacancy.
Wilson will start at blindside, with Curry taking over Underhill's openside berth, and Jones sounded happy to have the 31-year-old back in the mix to earn his 20th cap and his twelfth England start.
"He is a massively committed player," enthused Jones about Wilson who made a 2017 debut away to Argentina and was last capped in the March 2020 Six Nations win over Wales. "He is one of those players that didn't have the escalator through the pathway.
"He had to fight his way all the way. He was in the academy, got kicked out of the academy, he went to university, played university rugby, so rugby means a lot to him and he is a fighter, mate, he's a 100 per cent fighter."
Newcastle skipper Wilson, who has had shoulder and hamstring problems this past year, offered the best solution to Jones in terms of selecting a combination minus the injured Underhill. "We picked the back row as a combination, six, seven and eight," he said.
"With Underhill unfortunately unavailable we decided to shift Tom from six to seven. We were delighted with the way Billy finished the Autumn Cup. It looked like he was getting back to his best, so he fills the eight, and then we wanted a workrate player at six and Wilson is a great workrate player."
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Latest Comments
Nah, that just needs some more variation. Chip kicks, grubber stabs, all those. Will Jordan showed a pretty good reason why the rush was bad for his link up with BB.
If you have an overlap on a rush defense, they naturally cover out and out and leave a huge gap near the ruck.
It also helps if both teams play the same rules. ARs set the offside line 1m past where the last mans feet were😅
Go to commentsYeah nar, should work for sure. I was just asking why would you do it that way?
It could be achieved by outsourcing all your IP and players to New Zealand, Japan, and America, with a big Super competition between those countries raking it in with all of Australia's best talent to help them at a club level. When there is enough of a following and players coming through internally, and from other international countries (starting out like Australia/without a pro scene), for these high profile clubs to compete without a heavy australian base, then RA could use all the money they'd saved over the decades to turn things around at home and fund 4 super sides of their own that would be good enough to compete.
That sounds like a great model to reset the game in Aus. Take a couple of decades to invest in youth and community networks before trying to become professional again. I just suggest most aussies would be a bit more optimistic they can make it work without the two decades without any pro club rugby bit.
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