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Wales flanker Ellis Jenkins sidelined following problems with knee surgery
By Sam Smith
Cardiff director of rugby Dai Young has revealed that flanker Ellis Jenkins has not trained all summer after a knee operation at the end of last season has proven to be a "little problematic."
The 15-cap Wales international missed Cardiff's preseason encounter with Gloucester on Friday night, which the Cherry & Whites won 42-17 at Kingsholm, and WalesOnline have reported the cause for his absence.
The positive news for Jenkins and everyone involved with Cardiff and Wales is that this is not the knee that curtailed so much of his career, and saw him sidelined for 26 months after tearing his ACL against South Africa in November 2018.
"Ellis hasn't trained all summer," Young told WalesOnline. "He picked up a bit of a niggle in his knee. Not the one that he seriously injured, the other one.
"He had a clear out towards the end of last season, nothing serious, and it's been a little bit problematic, to be honest. Nobody is panicking about it but hopefully he's in training next week. That's the reason he didn't play against Gloucester."
Despite the scoreline, Young took positives from his side's loss in what was their first preseason outing of the year.
“We can take a lot of good things from tonight - it was a real worthwhile exercise," Young said to the Cardiff Rugby website. "It was always going to be a big challenge coming here because this was Gloucester’s third pre-season game, their season starts next week and that was not far off their best team.
“Lots of our boys weren't available for tonight's game, but that's a great challenge for the for the youngsters coming through. We had a very young backline first half, but I thought they did really well.
“Nobody wants to lose and nobody wants to rack up big scores but I think we'll take a lot out there tonight and the youngsters will take a lot."
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"Right, so even if they were the 4 worst teams in Champions Cup, you'd still have them back by default?"
I think (i) this would literally never happen, (ii) it technically couldn't quite happen, given at least 1 team would qualify via the challenge cup, so if the actual worst team in the CC qualified it would have to be because they did really well after being knocked down to the challenge cup.
But the 13th-15th teams could qualify and to be fair I didn't think about this as a possibility. I don't think a team should be able to qualify via the Champions Cup if they finish last in their group.
Overall though I like my idea best because my thinking is, each league should get a few qualification spots, and then the rest of the spots should go to the next best teams who have proven an ability to be competitive in the champions cup. The elite French clubs generally make up the bulk of the semi-final spots, but that doesn't (necessarily) mean that the 5th-8th best French clubs would be competitive in a slimmed down champions cup. The CC is always going to be really great competition from the semis onwards, but the issue is that there are some pretty poor showings in the earlier rounds. Reducing the number of teams would help a little bit, but we could improve things further by (i) ensuring that the on-paper "worst" teams in the competition have a track record of performing well in the CC, and (ii) by incentivising teams to prioritise the competition. Teams that have a chance to win the whole thing will always be incentivised to do that, but my system would incentivise teams with no chance of making the final to at least try to win a few group stage matches.
"I'm afraid to say"
Its christmas time; there's no need to be afraid!
Go to commentsYou are a very horrible man Ojohn. Brain injury perhaps?
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