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Ex England winger Chris Ashton teed up the 20-year-old Saracens winger Jack Bracken to make a late inclusion in Steve Borthwick’s World Cup squad this season.
The 2024 Rugby World Juniors winner and son of 2003 World Cup winner Kyran Bracken enters the new Gallagher PREM season after a sensational pre-season, scoring a hat-trick in Saracens’ 96-42 PREM Rugby Cup win Northampton Saints, and backed it up the following week with another hat-trick against Ampthill.
Of course, it is not easy for English players to break through the wing at the moment. Perhaps after the back row, it is the position where Borthwick has the most options. As there are rarely wings on the bench, there are realistically only two wing places in the team per game, so it is a devilish task to earn a place there, and perhaps even more difficult to keep it as Henry Arundell and Tom Roebuck experienced last year.
While there is no exact science to how a World Cup team is formulated, there are usually five full-back-three player spots in a team, meaning there will likely be room for three wings, a full-back and a player who can cover both.
Speaking ahead of the new season, Ashton said it was a given that British and Irish Lion Tommy Freeman would go alongside Immanuel Feyi-Waboso, with fellow 20-year-old Saracen Noah Caluori another likely candidate if he has another good year. That is likely to leave one wing/back spot, a profile that suits Braken, and the former 44-cap England winger believes Saracen could throw his hat in the ring this season.
“There’s a kid at Saracens who’s been a bit in and then a bit out, he’s played some champions,” Ashton said. RugbyPass. “But in pre-season he just looks like he could really have a strong start, and hopefully on the Saracens wing, that’s Jack Bracken. I hope we see a lot more of him.”
“He played a bit in the 15 position, so we might see him there, but probably on the wing. But if Jack Bracken has a good year, you never know, he’s a specialist.”
The only thing holding back any aspiring international, Ashton believes, is the brand of rugby that has emerged in domestic rugby in recent years. High-scoring games last season, as in Saracens’ 138-point PRC meeting with Northampton this month, do not make the players battle-hardened for the rigors of rugby’s tests, where defenses are scrutinized much more closely.
That’s a factor that works against Bracken and any player hoping to prove himself to Borthwick in the coming year, Ashton said.
“The big problem comes when you have international aspirations as a player,” he said. “When your team scores 40, 50 points, it’s non-transferable; you can’t go from taking 40 points at the weekend to playing Test matches, where it’s going to be a tight, relatively low-scoring game.
“I just think there needs to be more desperation in defending and stopping tries, not ‘we score one, you score one’. That’s never been the PREM I’ve known. It’s always been difficult to score a try, but we seem to have turned a lot towards attacking rugby.”
