England\u2019s world player of the year, Ellie Kildunne, is expected to be ready to play against France in the Women\u2019s Rugby World Cup semi\u2011final against France on Saturday after missing the 40-8 quarter-final win against Scotland on Sunday.<\/p>\n
The full-back did not play against Scotland because of concussion protocols, but afterwards the Red Roses head coach, John Mitchell, said: \u201cWe have a clean bill of health I think. Ellie is back running, back into collision work and she is going good.\u201d<\/p>\n
Kildunne sustained a head injury in England\u2019s final pool match against Australia and was taken off with concussion symptoms. That meant she has had to go through a mandatory 12-day stand-down period.<\/p>\n
England most recently thrashed France 40-6 in a World Cup warmup match last month, but only edged a much closer match, 43-42, in the Six Nations this year.<\/p>\n
On Sunday France reached the World Cup semi-finals after pipping Ireland 18-13 in their last-eight clash \u2013 and Mitchell said the match gave him \u201ca good look at old foes\u201d.<\/p>\n
The head coach said: \u201cWe respect them hugely and they got themselves out of a very difficult situation today in difficult conditions as well. They\u2019ll be energetic for us. They will definitely be better for us, there\u2019s no doubt about that. We are also looking forward to them as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mitchell was not happy with all of the calls made by the officials on Sunday. \u201cWe found weakness and cynical actions in their set piece and we went for the jugular there \u2026 Probably need to talk to World Rugby about understanding when teams are so cynical why we don\u2019t get awarded penalty tries sometimes.\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 When asked about the specific cynical play he was referring to, he said: \u201cDouble sacking in a lineout that should be a single sacking and there was repeated infringement at scrum time. The whole second half slowed down at scrum time. Look how dominant we were at scrum time, maul and scrum was superior so we should be rewarded for that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"England\u2019s world player of the year, Ellie Kildunne, is expected to be ready to play against France in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-137547","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-rugby","9":"tag-sports","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}