Manu Tuilagi remains a major doubt for England’s World Cup campaign because of injury, Leicester’s director of rugby, Richard Cockerill, has said.
Tuilagi has been hampered by a groin strain sustained in October and missed targets for a return in December, January and February because of the continuing nature of the problem. Now Cockerill has confirmed the player will not play again this season and is unlikely to be fully fit until June, the same month as England’s World Cup training camp. That would leave the centre in a race against time to get properly fit ahead of their first match of the tournament, against Fiji on 18 September.
“He [Tuilagi] won’t play this season,” Cockerill is quoted as saying by the Daily Telegraph. “He’ll probably be fit in the early part of June ready for England’s World Cup preparations. He is improving slowly. Groins are a probably the hardest thing to deal with and get to the bottom of. I know everyone would like it to be an exact science, but it’s not.”
According to the Telegraph, Tuilagi’s rehabilitation has involved undergoing sugar injections in his pubis and using a hydrotherapy pool at the national football centre at Burton. “He is a big, powerful guy,” added Cockerill. “He is improving but he’s not right yet.”
Cockerill has also urged Stuart Lancaster, the England coach, not to select Nick Abendanon, despite the full-back being named as European player of the year after a superb debut season at Clermont Auvergne, or Steffon Armitage, following another excellent campaign for the flanker at Toulon.
Cockerill is adamant that England’s policy of not selecting players based abroad is the right one even if, as is the case with Abendanon and Armitage, they are performing at a world-class level.
“It is essential it stays the way it is,” Cockerill is quoted as saying in the Daily Mail. “If you take that away and allow players to go anywhere in the world and still get picked for England, then I think it would be hugely damaging to the Premiership.”