NICK KENNEDY COLUMN: Disappointment for club and country

I was disappointed not to get into the revised England squad a couple of weeks ago. It was gutting to think that I wasn’t going to be part of the Test team.

But a week later I got called up as cover for Richard Blaze and was a part of the squad, training with the boys for two days and doing my best to help the team prepare for the Australia game.

I was released back to Irish and now have to do the best I can to get back playing for England. I’ve played every minute of every game for Irish this season and we’re second in the Premiership. I need to keep training hard and playing well and maybe then the call-up will come.

Against Australia on Saturday the set-piece worked efficiently and England started the game very well, but Australia came back strongly in the second half. England made a lot of mistakes and kicked away the ball too much. There were a lot of positives to take from the game, though, and the guys need to work on those in preparation for Argentina this weekend.

We’ll go into the game as favourites even though there are a lot of injuries. Argentina are also missing key players through injury, but England can’t afford to underestimate them.

It was a disappointing weekend for Irish, losing to Wasps in the cup, but we made 13 changes to the line-up, so the side had only trained together a couple of times before.

The cup is a priority of ours, but we have a really big squad and it’s a good chance to give some of the guys some game time.

It’s never good to lose your first game in the cup, but we’re playing Cardiff on Sunday and we’ll have to see how the pool pans out after that.