The Alfie Barbeary bandwagon was rolling at ever-increasing speed along the road to Twickenham until he picked up an injury last weekend and it will take plenty of stopping the moment he returns, being a Barbeary-sized vehicle.

The Wasps forward is being lauded to the high heavens as “the future of English rugby”, just as Bruce Springsteen was once labelled “the future of rock’n’roll”. No pressure, then.
And that’s the point. The “pressure point”, you might say. Springsteen has spent the last 40-odd years surpassing lofty initial expectations by a factor best measured in the thousands, but ...