Maro Itoje has not been deemed fit enough to take a full part in England’s training camp in Oxford this week and Charlie Ewels has been called up in place of the injured Courtney Lawes.
Eddie Jones is hopeful that Itoje will recover from a knee injury in time to face Italy on Saturday week following Lawes’ calf injury but he was not named in the 25-man squad for the Oxford camp which includes two days’ training against Georgia. The Saracens lock will attend the camp, however, to continue his rehabilitation from the injury sustained against Ireland earlier this month.
Jones’s decision to invite Georgia to train against England again comes as somewhat of a surprise. When they did so 12 months ago in the build-up to their Calcutta Cup match, they then lost to Scotland. England were decidedly sluggish at Murrayfield and after the match Jones said: “We changed the preparation for this game remarkably. We got Georgia in as we wanted to improve our set-piece work and that didn’t transfer to the game.”
Ewels’ inclusion, after Lawes was ruled out for the rest of the championship on Sunday, is the only change to the squad that travelled to Wales last week. Chris Ashton, who missed the 21-13 defeat in Cardiff with a calf injury, has not been included for the camp which runs from Tuesday to Friday while Jones has opted against sending any fringe members of his matchday squad back to their clubs. Jonny May will continue his return-to-play protocols in Oxford after failing his head injury assessment on Saturday.
Ewels’ Bath clubmates Sam Underhill and Anthony Watson will also attend the camp for medical checks with both currently sidelined through injury. Underhill has not featured since picking up an ankle injury in December while Watson has been out of action since last March with an achilles problem.
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Wales’s victory over England on Saturday was watched by a peak audience of 8.9m on the BBC, eclipsing both of the broadcaster’s high-profile FA Cup matches involving Manchester United this season. The tournament’s current broadcast deal with the BBC and ITV runs until 2021 and a move to paid-for TV has been discussed as part of plans for the creation of a new world league. The Six Nations unions are in favour of remaining on terrestrial TV, however.
