AFP/WellingtonEngland were dealt a blow yesterday when it was revealed that captain Lewis Moody will miss Saturday’s World Cup opener against Argentina due to a knee injury. Moody sustained medial ligament damage in a warm-up match against Wales on August 6. He had been due to return to training yesterday but England manager Martin Johnson made the call to rule his skipper out of the match on the advice of his medical staff. “Lewis won’t play at the weekend. He is not quite ready to go today,” said Johnson. “We hoped he would be fit to start training but he is not quite there. “It is quite a simple decision at the minute to hold him back another week. “The medics and the fitness guys take him through a progression of training and we hoped it would all be ready to go today but he is just a little bit short.” Mike Tindall is the favourite to inherit the captaincy, having done so in Moody’s absence during the Six Nations and in England’s last two warm-up games against Wales and Ireland. James Haskell, meanwhile, will probably take Moody’s place at number seven. Johnson, who will confirm his line-up for the Argentina match on Thursday, stressed Moody still had an important role to play at the tournament. “It is the opening game of what hopefully is a long tournament so you can force these things sometimes and that can go either way,” he said. “He has been running around today so he is not amn miles away. “It is just one of those calls: ‘Are you ready to participate fully this week and play a Test match this Saturday?’ Not quite.” Moody first injured his right knee in January while playing for his club side Bath and the injury forced him out of England’s triumphant Six Nations campaign. The veteran flanker suffered a repeat of the injury after Tom Palmer fell on him during a second-half line-out in the 23-19 win over Wales at Twickenham last month.
Two tries key for WCup glory, say England
Scoring two tries and grinding it out from there should be enough to get a team home in the Rugby World Cup, according to England’s attack coach Brian Smith. It may not be pretty, but it works and the World Cup is all about winning, added the former Australian international who switched hemispheres at the end of his playing days. “We want to win games, that’s what we’re about and we’ve got to play to the conditions to win the games,” he said ahead of their opening match against Argentina in Dunedin on Sunday. “Sometimes you’ve got to do what’s enough to win the game. It’s more important to get the result than about the style. “Statistically, if you score two tries in Test matches you win the game nine times out of 10 and that’s what you want to try and achieve.” Although he has a backline brimming with talent, and England have unleashed a more expansive game in recent years, that was irrelevant to Smith in a World Cup tournament. “We don’t care how the tries are scored, whether it’s through the pack or the backline,” he said. “We want to be productive. We want to put the opposition under a lot of pressure so they concede cheap points and if they concede cheap points we’re going to take them.”