face of significant criticism,, external<\/a> notably from Kangaroos legend Laurie Daley, Wane defended Jack Welsby staunchly earlier this week and suggested that he expected him to “bounce back strong” from an out-of-sorts display in London.<\/p>\nBut the omission of the versatile St Helens star suggests that AJ Brimson, who switched his international allegiance from Australia to England in May, will line up at full-back. <\/p>\n
The inclusion of the 27-year-old, whose mother is from south London and who has two brothers who were born in Chertsey, was mooted during Wane’s news conference immediately after the first Test. <\/p>\n
While Australia were able to make make several significant long-range breaks and key attacking metres, thanks largely to Reece Walsh’s contributions, England failed to make any real inroads from kick returns.<\/p>\n
Brimson’s pace and support play, plus his experience of playing against Australia’s stars for the Gold Coast Titans and Queensland, is an obvious attraction and it is hoped that could add a new dimension to England’s attack. <\/p>\n
“The way AJ has trained and what he brings to a team has been outstanding. I’m excited to see him,” added Wane, who has been accused of favouring Super League players over those based in Australia’s premier competition.<\/p>\n
“People in the room know what our players are capable of. The NRL people don’t yet and that hurts me.<\/p>\n
“I will feel better on Saturday if we have a go at them and attack the way we can attack and defend as physical as possible, which we didn’t do last weekend.<\/p>\n
“We got beat in a Test match. We got beat badly. It is part of being a head coach, I’ve had it [criticism] all my life. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wane’s biggest challenge has been to find a way to strike the right balance between the Super League…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":237376,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[5903,101,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-237375","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\/237375","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=237375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/237375\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/237376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=237375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=237375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=237375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}