Dylan Hartley faces a race against time to be fit for the start of the season following five months out with concussion after it emerged he did not take a full part in England’s pre-season training camp over the weekend.
Hartley returned to the England set-up for a three-day get-together in Teddington having missed the summer series defeat by South Africa but he has not played since England’s Six Nation defeat by Ireland in March. Eddie Jones, on announcing his 43-man squad last week, revealed he had previously rated Hartley’s chances of returning at all as “the flip of a coin”.
England did confirm that Hartley had come through the head injury return-to-play protocols successfully but he undertook a modified training programme on his return to Jones’s squad. “As ever, you’ve got to progress through your training, obviously he had a good spell out of the game and for any player who has a good spell out of the game there is always a progression through the different aspects of the game to be physically prepared,” said Steve Borthwick, the forwards coach. “And that’s the same for any player coming back from any amount of time. He trained well this morning. There’s always a post-training assessment for what we do in the next session and we decided to do some conditioning this afternoon.”
Jones, Borthwick and the scrum coach, Neal Hatley, will fly to Japan on Tuesday and conduct a series of coaching sessions with the Tokyo‑based side Suntory Sungoliath, 13 months before the World Cup. Borthwick said it would be useful to coach in the unique conditions the team will experience next year.
Meanwhile the former All Blacks head coach John Mitchell appears to have edged closer to the vacant role of England’s defence coach after reports in South Africa claimed the Blue Bulls were on the lookout for a replacement for their executive of rugby. Mitchell has previously been employed by England as forwards coach under Sir Clive Woodward from 1997 to 2000.
