England's White Knight of Rugby - Jonny Wilkinson - Is Back in Action!

Yes the news we all have been waiting for, Jonny Wilkinson has played again without any reaction to his previous shoulder or neck injury. 

Jonny returned to action in a Falcons pre-season warm up match against Connacht in which the Faclons won 32 -9 on the 17th August.  4,500 supporters turned up to see England's Fly Half play, they crammed onto the adjacent greyhound track to catch a glimpse of the action using every vantage point they could.  As expected the media interest in the Rugby World Cup Hero's comeback was enormous, the world’s press were in attendance and a training session and a few hundred autographs later, the press finally managed to talk to Jonny.

Our White Knight of ~England said..... “I am very happy and relieved to come through it,” he said. “It was nice to get some rugby under my belt and start to get back to something like normality. I took a slight bang on the elbow, but the shoulder is absolutely fine — there was no reaction. I tried as hard as I could to test it out. I am pleased with that.

“The work now is more on the actual game itself rather than the shoulder. I was a little rusty, having been out of competition for a while. That will improve the more I play. The plan now is to get as much game time as possible. I am thrilled to be back on the field and back out there when I might never have played.”

Rob Andrew said after a successful 40-minute spell for his England star: “He feels very pleased with how it went. “Inevitably after so long out he will be a little match rusty, but physically he feels fantastic. He took some pretty big hits out there, so there’s no issue at all with the injury as far as we’re concerned. All he wants to do now is play again on Monday against Munster.”

Questioned about the worry of an injury free Wilkinson,  Andrew said: “That’s understandable I suppose, but if you’d seen him doing contact training in the last three weeks then you would have had no doubts whatsoever that he was ready.”

When asked if Jonny had been hitting as hard in training as he did before the injury,  he stated with a grin: “Harder. Much harder. “If you were watching him closely tonight, you would have seen that he was involved in more than half a dozen fierce contact situations, either making tackles or being tackled. “He’s fine, there’s no more to it. He will play against Munster on Monday and then against Pertemps Bees next weekend, and then we‘ll see about picking a team to play Worcester from there.

“Seriously though, he’s been outstanding all pre-season, on and off the field. He’s as good as I’ve ever seen him in terms of his encouragement for the rest of the team, what he offers the players in terms of motivation and what he wants to achieve with the club.

“He’s absolutely on fire, and he’s been really relaxed. In the last 24 hours before the match we saw him switch to game mode because it was a big night for him, but that’s the way it should be and we wouldn’t expect anything else from him or any of the players. He’s just being very professional, and I’m sure he’ll do the same leading into the Munster game.”   

So........... look out Munster the White Knight of England and Falconshire is on his way to you!

Falcons v Connacht  RFU Match Report by Mark Smith here...

Jonny Wilkinson-Free Com, in conjunction with Bigart - How to enter here

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