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Flood Back In The Fray

Fri 26 Oct, 12:09 AM


Newcastle Falcons welcome back World Cup finalist Toby Flood to their starting line-up for Saturday's EDF Energy Cup trip to Gloucester.

However, Flood's fellow England colleagues Jonny Wilkinson and Mathew Tait will have to wait until next weekend at the earliest before they return to action.

In total the Falcons have made five personnel changes and two positional switches.

Flood's return at fly-half sees summer signing Steve Jones shift one place to inside centre for Joe Shaw, who misses the game due to illness.

The season-ending injury to Matthew Burke means in-form winger Tom May must continue his try-scoring streak from full-back as Ollie Phillips comes on to the right wing, while at scrum-half Hall Charlton gets a first run-out of the season.

In the front row a minor calf problem rules out Jon Golding as All Black Joe McDonnell returns to skipper the side from loose head prop - the only other change to the side coming at tight head where David Wilson takes the place of Micky Ward.

On the bench there could be a Falcons first-team debut for England Under-19s full-back Alex Tait, whose elder brother Mathew is not considered for this weekend after playing in every game for England during the World Cup.

Speaking about the decision to bring Flood straight back in to his starting XV, director of rugby John Fletcher said: "Toby will make a difference to us as he would do to any side, simply because he's a world-class player.

"That isn't disrespectful to the other players who have been in there, they are just at a different stage of their development. Coaching is a lot easier when you have top quality players, and Toby certainly falls in to that category.

"He's a good kid and he knows what we've done for him down the years. He hasn't played a lot of football this season, and to be honest if he hadn't been involved with our pre-season campaign I wouldn't have played him this weekend because he's only had one training session with the Falcons squad this week.

"At training yesterday he was shouting England calls and some of our backs were looking at each other totally confused, but he's getting that out of his system now and he knows what is needed this weekend.

"Maybe if Mark Mayerhofler and Matt Burke were around this weekend we could have afforded to give Toby a week off, but then to be fair the only reason that Jonny Wilkinson and Mathew Tait aren't involved this weekend is because they're carrying slight knocks."

Revealing the nature of those problems, Fletcher said: "Mat just has a bit of swelling on his knee and is generally a bit sore, but he should be okay to be involved against the Dragons next week hopefully along with Jonny.

"Both of them will be back in some form of training on Monday. Jonny's scan came back fine, it was just a whack on his ankle and we don't anticipate any major problems with it. The physios will give it a fancy name, but basically it's just a twisted ankle. Taity I would say will definitely be involved next week, and Jonny should be close at this stage."

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