Mike Brown and Ben Te’o first to fall in fight for a place in England’s 31-man
World Cup squad but more will followEddie Jones believes that fighting spirit will be needed to win a World Cup that the
England head coach predicts will be the tightest yet, but not of the sort that led him to cull Mike Brown and Ben Te’o from the squad to prepare for the first of four warm-up matches for the tournament, against Wales at Twickenham on Sunday.
Brown, the Harlequins’ full-back, and Te’o, the centre who left Worcester at the end of the season and is expected to finish his career abroad, had moved to the periphery in the past year, having been keystones in Jones’s squad. Even without reports of an altercation between the pair during what was billed as a bonding session at the recent training camp in
Italy, which Jones did not deny, they both had an outside chance of making the 31-man squad for
Japan that will be announced on Monday.