England’s plans for the Calcutta Cup collision in Edinburgh on Saturday have been dealt a heavy double blow with the captain, Courtney Lawes, and the lock Jonny Hill both confirmed absentees through injury. The head coach, Eddie Jones, will now have to find an alternative captain and fill two more sizeable holes in his already reshuffled team to face Scotland at Murrayfield.
Neither Lawes nor Hill has been able to train fully this week because of concussion and a stress fracture of the leg respectively and Jones has now accepted he must look elsewhere. The absence of Lawes, who was replaced after taking a blow in the second half of Northampton’s game against Ulster this month, means the captaincy is now likely to pass to Sale’s Tom Curry or, conceivably, Exeter’s Luke Cowan-Dickie.
With Owen Farrell, Manu Tuilagi and Jonny May already sidelined before a significant game for both sides, it leaves Jones uncomfortably short of experience on the eve of the Six Nations championship. While Joe Marler is now back from his period of Covid isolation, either Bath’s Charlie Ewels or Northampton’s Nick Isiekwe is now likely to start in the second row with Leicester’s uncapped Ollie Chessum a potential bench candidate.
Raffi Quirke, Joe Heyes, Luke Northmore, Alfie Barbeary, Adam Radwan, Orlando Bailey, Louis Lynagh have also been cut from the enlarged training squad, leaving Mark Atkinson and Harry Randall as likely matchday squad members for a game that will test England’s depth and resolve.
“The two things that have been really spoken about are the resilience of the team and how the team rallies around each other in adversity,” the scrum coach Matt Proudfoot said.
The weather is also set to be a sizeable factor, with heavy rain and gusty winds anticipated on Saturday. Proudfoot, a former Scottish international, is fully aware just how tricky the Murrayfield elements can be and says the visiting coaching staff “have been keeping a very close eye” on the Edinburgh forecast. “The nature of Murrayfield means the wind plays a massive factor,” he said. “You need experience of having played there and of how the wind swirls in the stadium. We are trying to replicate that for the players so they will be used to it when they get there.”
Proudfoot also insists England do not have a leadership vacuum in the absence of so many familiar names and that Curry, Cowan-Dickie and Ellis Genge are all equipped to step up. “I think we are in a good position when it comes to leadership,” he said. “It is not led by one man, it is led by a group of people.”
There is still a faint chance, however, that Harlequins’ Joe Marchant might feature, despite having been forced to train at home this week after testing positive for Covid last Friday. London Irish’s uncapped wing Ollie Hassell-Collins has also been retained along with Exeter’s Jack Nowell. Collectively England are clearly already braced for a thunderous encounter with Cowan-Dickie under no illusions – “Anything they do right or we do wrong you are going to know about it” – about the likely atmosphere.
Jones’s team have also won just one of their past four matches with Scotland and Proudfoot says the intensity of training has visibly ramped up: “Yesterday’s training session was tough. The boys took it to each other because they know what’s coming this weekend.”
England will at least go into the game feeling well fed, with the celebrity chef Tom Kerridge having been invited into camp to cook up a barbecue for them. It is the sizeable amount of Scottish beef awaiting them on Saturday, though, that will ultimately shape their campaign.
