Rugby World Cup 2019: Mike Brown sweats back into England contention after making most of Treviso camp
Full-back convinced Eddie Jones to recall him after being initially left out of his World Cup plans to book his place to the sweat-box that is England’s Italian training camp
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Your support makes all the difference.England’s mid-summer excursion to Treviso could not have gone much better from a planning point of view. High temperatures and humidity levels that yesterday hit 90 per cent has not only put the squad through their hardest training camp yet, but given them a real taste of what to expect in Japan next month.
“It’s incredibly tough,” admits Mike Brown, who has had to put up with more than most this summer. The Harlequins full-back has seen his place in the starting XV desert him over the last 12 months, before being dropped from the squad completely last autumn. When Eddie Jones named his initial World Cup training squad last month, his name was nowhere to be seen.
So it is all the more impressive that the 33-year-old finds himself making a late charge towards World Cup selection.
“Obviously, you want to be named in all the squads that Eddie announces,” he said. “We are all competitive animals so we’d be disappointed and we’d be lying if we didn’t say we were disappointed if we weren’t named.
“But I have been back in for the last three weeks, training as hard as possible to offer competition for places and also to make sure the team, whoever Eddie picks, is in the best place possible.
“You have that doubt at the back of your mind, but Eddie said just be ready so I went straight back to ruins and was welcomed with a Bronco fitness test. That was pretty savage then I made sure I was ready. I was over the moon to get the chance to come back in and continue.”
Brown has felt his fair share of World Cup misery before. He was very much out of the picture during Martin Johnson’s reign as England coach, only for Stuart Lancaster to hand him the No 15 jersey in his very first match post-2011 World Cup. Yet his memories of the tournament itself are confined to the painful scars left from the 2015 campaign, and the difference between the build-up to the home tournament four years ago and this one under Jones has been noticeable.
“The fitness has been different and a lot more tailored to different positions,” Brown added. “Both have been hard, but off the field we are getting things right which maybe we didn’t then. It’s been tough, (but we’ve) got through some quality work.”
A lot of that has been achieved in Italy where Jones took his squad for a 12-day training camp to experience the type of conditions that arise in Japan. But the intense sessions that the Australian had planned for their European trip has taken its toll in more ways than normal. They are testing the players in ways they’ve never experienced before, such as the unpleasant sensation of boiling sweat and mass weight loss during a single training session.
It is crucial information that each player will need to gather for Japan if they are to know how to look after their conditioning in the Far East.
Brown explains: “It’s about 80 per cent humidity today so as soon as you step outside, everyone starts sweating. You are absolutely dripping with sweat and that makes ball-handling very tough. And also, for your core temperature, it is hard to keep that low, because you are sweating all the time and it just sits on your skin and then heats up even more so you can’t get your body temperature down.
“You are constantly feeling incredibly hot. It is really sunny here as well so just to try and keep your core temperature down is the hardest thing. We have got things in place in training to do that – guys coming on and spraying you with cold water, constantly trying to wipe the sweat off you so your skin gets the chance to cool down and things like that.
“We weigh ourselves at the start of sessions and then after so you know how much weight you have lost. The nutrition guys make sure you get the right things after training to put that weight on. For example, our first really hard session here last Wednesday, I lost 3kg of weight. So it’s about getting the fluids back on and eating more after a session.
“In England, I would probably barely lose any weight from a normal session in normal conditions. After a Test match, I would probably lose a maximum of 1kg, and that’s playing at the highest level under massive fatigue. So that puts it into perspective of the weight loss that you can get over here.
“Once you have taken all the right things, we will go and eat lunch and you are pretty much back on it by the afternoon session no problem – as long as you do the right things.”
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