England fly-half Jonny Wilkinson is still not yet ready to return for the Newcastle Falcons.
England star not ready to return for Newcastle
England fly-half Jonny Wilkinson is still not yet ready to return for the Newcastle Falcons.
Wilkinson has yet to play for his club since the World Cup final in France, and missed the Falcons' 29-24 EDF Energy Cup win over the Newport-Gwent Dragons on Saturday.
Newcastle director of rugby John Fletcher admits the star also looks set to miss the European Challenge Cup contest against Centransa El Salvador next time out, as he continues to battle back to full fitness.
Doubt
"Next week is probably a week to soon for Jonny," Fletcher said. "His ankle is responding to treatment and while he will be on the plane to Spain, we probably won't risk him.
"However, we do expect Jamie Noon, Phil Dowson and Ben Woods to be in the mix and we expect Toby Flood to have recovered from the back spasm which is why we took him off in the second-half tonight.
"He could have played on but it would have been unfair to him to keep him on the field when he was struggling."
Disappointment
The Dragons scored four tries in the defeat and picked up two bonus points after their second-half comeback.
Newport head coach Paul Turner added: "You have to say we left too much on the table in the first-half and got punished for it. We got back into a winning position but made too many errors.
"We did prove today we can play a bit, but you cannot give a quality player like Toby Flood that sort of room and we had two guys in the sin bin and you can't do that.
"I was furious at half-time. In the end there were a lot of good things about tonight, but you cannot afford to make those sort of errors against a side like Newcastle."