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Here are your rugby headlines for Sunday, August 27.
By PA Sport Staff
England have confirmed that Jonny May has replaced Anthony Watson in their squad for the World Cup. Watson has been ruled out of the tournament by a calf injury so May, who started Saturday's defeat to Fiji, has filled the gap in the 33-man party to be submitted to World Rugby on Monday.
The only other name missing from the group originally named by Steve Borthwick on August 7 is Jack van Poortvliet whose ankle problem means he has been replaced by Alex Mitchell.
Elliot Daly and Kyle Sinckler are also present as they continue their recovery from respective knee and pectoral injuries.
England prop Ellis Genge has hit out at doubters in a late night tweet following their defeat to Fiji. In the early hours of Sunday morning, Genge posted: "Write us off now, all the best."
Then, he took to social media again on Sunday to thank supporters for their support, saying: "Big congratulations to @fijirugby on a historic win. To all the @EnglandRugby fans *supporting* us, we know we’re not where we need to be at all right now. We will get there, stick with us through the dark, thanks for the love we appreciate it."
Some social media users suggested that the use of asterisks around the word "supporter" suggested Genge was being disingenuous about England fans' reactions to the defeat, but the player insisted in replies they were simply to stress the importance of those genuinely supporting England.
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Scotland captain Jamie Ritchie says Scotland are “ready to go” ahead of the World Cup after a encouraging warm-up campaign. A convincing victory over Georgia made it three wins from four for Gregor Townsend’s team ahead of the tournament in France.
“I’m really chuffed but probably the predominant emotion now is excitement – we’re just ready to go,” said Ritchie. “I feel we’ve built well. We’ve not had a perfect performance yet but for me that’s a positive thing because we know there’s one coming. I’m glad we had a little bit of a tough test in that first half against Georgia. We had to manage ourselves through that and then we stepped up in the second.”
“Positive,” added Ritchie, when asked to sum up the warm-up matches. “I think we’ve shown that we can play really well, we’ve shown that we can come back from adversity, which I think is a really positive thing, and we’ve played some really good rugby.
“We’ve shown how we’ve grown over this period in terms of how we’ve wanted to build when we’ve had this extended period of time together and we’re really clear on how we want to play. It’s not been perfect but we’ve had more positive results and positive performances than not and we’re really excited for this first game.”
George Ford admits England must not be training well after a tough warm-up campaign. Steve Borthwick's side fell to a current tier two nation for the first time in their 152-year history with the loss against Fiji, registering a fifth defeat in six matches.
“Any time you play for England – especially at Twickenham – you’ve got to pull out on the right side of the scoreboard and unfortunately we had a lot of errors against Fiji,” Ford said. “We’re making too many errors. Now what the reason for that is I can’t be sure. Maybe it is a little bit of over eagerness or a little bit of inaccuracy, or maybe it is a little bit of understanding. It’s probably a little bit of all of it, to be honest. But one thing for sure is we can’t keep doing it.
“When it comes to our plan for Argentina and our understanding of what we need to do to win that game, we’ll be crystal clear on it. I’m more than confident we’ll be able to get it right for that game.
“We understand that we need to make fewer mistakes. There’s an urgency that we need to fix it and get better.
“The way you do that is to be more consistent in training. We’re clearly not consistent in training, there are probably too many errors in training. We’re playing the way we train at the minute, which is not good enough obviously.”
Stand-in captain Iain Henderson insists looming World Cup selection was not a factor in Ireland’s underwhelming performance against Samoa.
Andy Farrell's side scraped past Samoa in less than convincing style on the eve of his World Cup squad being named, but they still had enough to secure a 13th consecutive win.
When asked if the World Cup squad announcement was a factor in the performance, second-row Henderson said: “No and if it did it’s probably one of the adversities that Faz [Andy Farrell] would like us to be tested by. That’s not the most difficult thing we’re going to face over the next number of weeks.
“It’s an incredibly strong group of guys and the guys who’ve been waiting to find out their fate have probably carried themselves as well as you could have expected them to throughout training. The guys who are nervous about selection, who might be carrying that anxiety have trained well, everyone’s been on time, been as diligent as possible throughout the reviews, staying on top of stuff.
“It’s been a well-prepped Test week for us, so hats off to those guys who’ve been prepping so well. I think it’s not that side of things that affected us, it was a handful of other things like conditions, probably great pressure brought by Samoa.”