How Steve Borthwick will decide which 10 players to cut from England’s squad

Steve Borthwick and his backroom staff will hold their crunch meeting to finalise England’s 33-man squad for the 2023 Rugby World Cup this Saturday night – in a hotel in Wales.

Borthwick will use the evidence of England’s opening summer friendly, against Wales in Cardiff on Saturday afternoon, to decide which 10 players among the 43 currently in camp will be chopped from the squad for next month’s big tournament in France to be announced on Monday.

Borthwick will then deliver the good or bad news face to face with the players on Sunday – a clear shift from the last World Cup in 2019 when flanker Lewis Ludlam learnt of his inclusion by coach Eddie Jones via being added to a team WhatsApp group.

Attack coach Richard Wigglesworth said on Tuesday that England’s fitness boss Aled Walters – a Welshman – had jokingly suggested holding the crucial final selection debate in the Walkabout pub in Cardiff city centre.

“I’m not sure Steve’s going to let that fly,” said Wigglesworth, while explaining more seriously that decisions such as how many fly-halves will be taken to France would be left to the last minute. “There’s a word that’s not in my dictionary, that exceeds ‘diligent’, for what Steve brings,” Wigglesworth said of Borthwick. “He’s the most detailed, organised coach that I’ve seen – that’s for planning, preparation and also selection.

“Until you have had all the information – all the bumps, bruises and injuries, everything – we wouldn’t set ‘this is how the squad is going to be picked’. If you do that and someone gets injured then you are going to make life difficult for yourself.

“We’ve not carried a big squad, deliberately. As a result, there are not 20 decisions to make. But until you say ‘this is the final 33’, you are waiting to collect every bit of information you can.”

Amid the public conjecture, a case can be made for uncapped tyros Tom Pearson and Tom Willis to prove their mettle in Cardiff, or for the experienced fly-half George Ford to taste England duty as soon as possible after a long injury absence.

“I wouldn’t call England v Wales a trial game by any means,” said Wigglesworth. “If you go into it thinking it’s a trial game, both personally and as a team, we’re going to come unstuck. It’s a Test match in its own right and we want to find Test-match players.”

Leicester forward Ollie Chessum appears to have timed his recovery from a fracture dislocation of his ankle, suffered during the final week of the Six Nations, to perfection.

Th 6ft 7ins Chessum, who has nine caps and can play as a right-hand lock or blindside flanker, was subject to a gloomy initial outlook from Borthwick back in March but on Tuesday the 22-year-old took part in a live scrum practice at England’s Surrey headquarters after previously being listed as rehabilitating alongside the main squad.

Wigglesworth said: “He’s had no complications and had flown into his rehab. He gave pretty strong evidence that he’s a top international player when he was fit.”

England kick off their World Cup against Argentina in Marseille on 9 September.