Skip to main content

England play Generation Game against All Blacks with overhaul of traditional order of selection

Steve Borthwick has picked six British & Irish Lions on his bench with a further nod to the growing importance of the endgame

Selecting your best XV to start a big rugby match feels increasingly quaint these days, as redolent of a different era as the Generation Game or Starsky & Hutch. To the point where you half expect to find the home team sheet to face New Zealand this weekend has D-N-A-L-G-N-E printed at the top of it. Even with the All Blacks in town, the traditional order of selection no longer applies.

Instead it is all about the endgame. On this occasion Steve Borthwick has picked six British & Irish Lions on his bench compared with only four in his starting lineup. At some point around the 50th minute on Saturday there will be a mass discarding of XXL tracksuits and a whole fresh set of white orcs will rumble on. As South Africa’s “Bomb Squad” have long since shown, it can be mighty hard to combat.

Continue reading...

from The Guardian https://ift.tt/cviXLWe
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Guardian view on Covid-19, five years on: lessons still to be learned | Editorial

Though many would rather forget the pandemic, we are living with its consequences. Are we any better prepared for the next one? “When asked what was the biggest disaster of the twentieth century, almost nobody answers the Spanish flu,” notes Laura Spinney in her book Pale Rider, of an event that killed as many as one in 20 of the global population. “There is no cenotaph, no monument in London, Moscow or Washington DC.” Most of us will better understand that absence after Covid-19 , which was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization five years ago this week. Some cannot put those events behind them: most obviously, many of those bereaved by the 7 million deaths worldwide (not including those indirectly caused by the pandemic ), and the significant numbers still living with long Covid . Others want to forget the loss of loved ones, the months of isolation and the costs to businesses, families and mental health. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? I...
Post a Comment
Read more