Danny Wilson, Harlequins’ head coach, has taken aim at Saracens by claiming that his club would never disrespect the Investec Champions Cup by naming a second team in a knockout match.
Saracens, who like Quins are chasing a place in the Gallagher Premiership play-offs, travel to Toulon in the last-16 on Saturday and Mark McCall, Saracens’ director of rugby, has said that they would prioritise the league over Europe by resting Test stars.
England players who featured in all five Six Nations matches – such as Saracens’ Maro Itoje, Ben Earl and Tom Willis – are obliged to miss one of the first three matches after the championship. Itoje and Willis played against Harlequins and Leicester in the Premiership so will be forced to miss this weekend’s trip to the Côte d’Azur.
“A lot of the English teams have done this, it’s not just us,” McCall said, as he also opted to rest Earl, Elliot Daly and Jamie George this weekend, the latter two of whom also featured heavily for England in the Six Nations.
Harlequins’ England trio – Fin Baxter, Chandler Cunningham-South and Marcus Smith – are all available this weekend after being controversially rested for the first match back after the Six Nations, when the visitors defied the odds to defeat a fully-loaded Saracens at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
When asked about the approach of his fellow Londoners on Tuesday, Wilson said: “I can’t see us ever at Harlequins putting a second team out in a Champions Cup game. That’s disrespecting what I think the competition is. It’s an exciting competition that we want to be part of and [we] want to do ourselves justice.
“Having said that, we have to manage our squad, full stop, because the three games that we’ve had coming out of the break [were] Saracens away, Bath away, Leinster away — we haven’t had a home game for three weeks and obviously [there was] a lot of travel, a lot of challenges, a lot of physical, confrontational games, which means you have to manage your squad.”
Last year, Wilson selected both Danny Care and Joe Marler in three successive Premiership rounds despite the duo’s Six Nations involvement and then opted to rest them for the Champions Cup quarter-final in Bordeaux – a match that Quins won 42-41. Harlequins’ head coach says he has learnt a lot from how that period in the spring of 2024 was managed.
“Our approach was built on lessons learnt from last year,” Wilson said. “We all know players come out of those international periods emotionally, ...
