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Wood to miss England tour after Champions Cup play-off red card
By Jack Davies
Northampton Saints flanker Tom Wood will miss England’s tour to Argentina after being banned for six weeks following a red card received during Friday’s Champions Cup play-off victory over Stade Francais.
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Wood was sent off in the 63rd minute of the 23-22 win for a stamp that made contact with the head of Stade full-back Djibril Camara, with the offence deemed to be at the top end of World Rugby’s criteria and carrying a potential suspension of 12 weeks to a year.
However, after an independent disciplinary committee selected 12 weeks as the appropriate entry point, Wood’s ban was reduced to six weeks based on his guilty plea, expression of remorse and good disciplinary record.
Both Wood and European Professional Club Rugby (EPCR) have the right to appeal the ban, which will see Wood absent for England’s Tests against Argentina on June 10 and 17.
England coach Eddie Jones had expressed pessimism at the weekend that he would have Wood at his disposal.
“He had an error of judgement,” the Australian said. “He did something silly, and now he pays the price. It is highly unlikely he will go on tour because he will be in strife.
“Whenever you make contact with someone’s head, you will be in trouble. Everyone knows the laws.
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“He is a very disciplined, committed player, and it is out of character for him, but these things happen.”
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Hope now we can get some clarity about next season and beyond in terms of format. Presently between the Prem, the Champ and the 2 clubs being rebuilt we have 25 teams, but it sounds like the long term plan is 2 professional divisions of 10 clubs each. So 5 have to go. I'm curious to see how they solve for that. Simplest way I suppose would be 11 team Prem, 14 team Champ, 1 relegated from the Prem, 5 relegated from the Champ with no one promoted. Issue with that is, Ealing is probably suing to come up, and also I feel like if they are going to ring-fence below the Champ, I'd imagine the team who go down, they'd want to base that on things like financial prospects and the size of their ground rather than just who has a bad run of form next season.
Go to commentssounds like BS to me but he sure knows more about rugby than I.
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