Hunt ruled out of Grand Slam decider
England without scrum-half for title defence against Italy Teenager Talling handed her debut cap as Kildunne returns
England will be without their talismanic scrum-half Natasha Hunt when they go in pursuit of back-toback Grand Slam titles tomorrow, after the Gloucester-hartpury captain tested positive for coronavirus.
Simon Middleton, the England head coach, said Hunt’s withdrawal was a “massive disappointment” but hailed the “cast- i ron protocol” which she followed to ensure no other players were affected.
Wasps’ Claudia Macdonald will start in Hunt’s place for England’s final match of their disrupted Six Nations campaign, at the Stadio Sergio Lanfranchi in Parma, where they will defend their 2019 Grand Slam.
“Mo flagged it as soon as she got an indication that she could have been a contact,” Middleton said. “She was made aware personally through a phone call and then made the medical staff aware, and they then took the appropriate steps. That’s four times we’ve tested more than 50 staff and players now, and that was just the one, so we’re really confident in our processes.”
England’s Grand Slam decider will be the sole fixture this weekend in the heavily-disrupted women’s championship, after Ireland’s clash with France and Scotland’s trip to face Wales, in Cardiff, were both postponed after positive Covid-19 tests.
Middleton has handed a debut to 18-year-old Morwenna Talling, who starts in the second-row, having first been called up to the England camp a year ago after impressing in last year’s curtailed Premier 15s season.
“I remember going to Loughborough [ last year] and I was like, ‘ Who’s that?’ A voice came from behind me and it was this really big guy. I said, ‘ You must be her dad’. I knew straight away we needed to keep watching her,” Middleton said. “We wanted to wait until she was 18 ideally, but she typifies everything we’re looking for in terms of how we want to move forward. I didn’t think twice about capping her.”
Ellie Kildunne, one of a host of sevens players to have rejoined the XVS game in the wake of the Rugby Football Union cutting its men’s and women’s sevens programme due to the pandemic, starts at full-back in her first Six Nations match for more than two years.
Middleton said he already had a “rough idea” of his World Cup squad, with less than a year until the tournament in New Zealand but, with uncertainty over whether the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics in 2021 will go ahead, stressed that sevens players were part of his plans.
“It’s a great opportunity for us to add 15 or 20 players back into the XVS programme. They’ve all got ambitions to play in the World Cup, just as they have the Olympics. That’s an opportunity that exists for them now,” he said.
It remains to be seen whether the Covid-19 outbreak among France’s backroom staff will force the cancellation of England’s two autumn friendlies with Les Bleues next month. England are due to travel to France for the first of those on Nov 14, with a return fixture at Twickenham on Nov 21.
“I’d probably do Plan B, like Eddie [Jones] – grab some paper and run upstairs and start scribbling things out,” Middleton quipped, echoing the England head coach’s comments after his side’s Six Nations build-up
was affected by the cancellation of their Barbarians match. “We’ll probably hold training camps. We’re a bit like the SAS, we’re ready to react to anything at a minute’s notice.”