Australia\u2019s captain, Harry Wilson, dismissed accusations his team are guilty of illegal breakdown tactics on the eve of England\u2019s meeting with the Wallabies at Twickenham on Saturday and suggested it was English \u201cwhingeing\u201d.<\/p>\n
The England head coach, Steve Borthwick, reportedly raised the issue of Australian players frequently joining rucks from the side with the referee, Nika Amashukeli, in a pre-match meeting, according to the Daily Telegraph.<\/p>\n
Wilson, however, batted away claims of illegality and compromised player safety due to the alleged infringements while the England scrum coach, Tom Harrison, declined to confirm if the issue had been raised by the hosts.<\/p>\n
\u201cFirstly I\u2019d like to question how many of them are illegal,\u201d Wilson said. \u201cAnd to say they\u2019re dangerous, they are definitely not. There\u2019s no way Joe [Schmidt] will coach a team to be illegal at the breakdown.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think we\u2019ve had over 2,000 rucks this year and for them to cherrypick a couple of rucks out of it, it\u2019s quite amusing. We\u2019re pretty excited for the opportunity to go out there and have a really good fair game.\u201d<\/p>\n
Adding a dash of extra spice, Wilson also said Borthwick was looking for an \u201cexcuse\u201d when he drew attention to England\u2019s relative lack of training time together. \u201cThey have had four months together, we\u2019ve got four sessions,\u201d Borthwick said on Tuesday. Asked if the Wallabies have an advantage in that respect Wilson said: \u201cYeah, I guess so. They want to put that out there as an excuse for them. We\u2019ve been playing together all year. We\u2019ve had a lot of footy in a row \u2026 the continuity is there because we\u2019ve been playing a lot.\u201d<\/p>\n
At England\u2019s later media briefing, Harrison insisted Borthwick\u2019s meeting with Amashukeli was private. \u201cI haven\u2019t been involved,\u201d he said, after querying the accuracy of the report on the alleged protest to the Georgian referee.<\/p>\n
\u201cSteve has conversations with the referees and I\u2019m not involved in those meetings. I think you can respectfully say those meetings are kept private.\u201d<\/p>\n
Harrison, however, added that rugby is \u201cgrey\u201d in certain areas and that the officiating of rucks and other elements of the game will inevitably spark debate. \u201cI think in every game there\u2019s always controversial issues around breakdowns, scrum, lineout, offside \u2026 the game of rugby is grey,\u201d Harrison said. \u201cReferees play a huge part in the game from an entertainment point of view, from a disciplinary point of view.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat I would say is Nika is an outstanding referee. He\u2019s strong in his approach. One of his strengths as a referee is the breakdown. I think we are fully looking forward to that.\u201d<\/p>\n
skip past newsletter promotion<\/a><\/p>\n The latest rugby union news and analysis, plus all the week’s action reviewed<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com<\/a> to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy<\/a>. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy<\/a> and Terms of Service<\/a> apply.<\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Wilson had stressed that Australia \u201ctry and make it easy\u201d for referees around rucks to avoid such complaints from the opposition.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen a team is playing 10 or 11 Tests any team would have some from the side,\u201d he said of ruck play in general. \u201cWe think we\u2019re quite good at attacking breakdown \u2026 referees have a lot on their mind. They\u2019re under the pump and we just want to try and make it as easy as we can for them by trying to be as square as possible. So there\u2019s not too much whingeing.\u201d<\/p>\n On whether some pre-match needle is good for any England v Australia fixture, Harrison said: \u201cI can\u2019t say it\u2019s a bad thing.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Australia\u2019s captain, Harry Wilson, dismissed accusations his team are guilty of illegal breakdown tactics on the eve of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-253896","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-rugby","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}