IT seems a criminal waste that players of the calibre of flanker Jack Willis and winger Henry Arundell are unavailable for England this autumn.
They could be the X-factor that separates winning from losing against the All Blacks, Wallabies, and Springboks – with Toulouse star Willis described recently by Thierry Dusautoir, the club’s great former France captain, as indispensable to the 2025 Lions.
Yet, The Channel has become an unbridgeable barrier, thanks to the French exclusion zone imposed by the RFU at the behest of the Premiership’s protectionist ring-fence ...