‘I know what I can do’: Louis Rees-Zammit finding form with Gloucester

During this year’s Six Nations, lightning did not strike twice. Whereas Louis Rees-Zammit blazed his way through his debut championship in 2021, he failed to score a try and was axed for Wales’s key match against England. His Gloucester director of rugby, George Skivington, sums up nicely the predicament the 21-year-old winger found himself in: “When you’re one of the poster boys of the game, everybody knows when you’ve been dropped.”

It represented a first major setback for Rees-Zammit, the youngest member of last year’s British & Irish Lions squad, but one that he dwelled on for all of five minutes. He does not lack for self‑belief, repeatedly insisting “I know what I can do”, but Skivington sees a more rounded player who still has considerable room to improve.

He has scored five Premiership tries this season – the same as last term – but a loss in form led to his high-profile omission from the Twickenham encounter and the suspicion that maybe not everything is coming as easy to Rees-Zammit as when he burst on to the scene.

“I get down on myself for about five minutes then I’m straight on my laptop to analyse and look at my game,” he says. “When I get dropped or play badly, I’ve just got to learn from it.

“It’s not really a confidence thing because I know what I can do – it’s just about doing your training then going out at the weekend and putting it all on show. Hopefully, I’ve done that pretty well. It hasn’t taken me too long.

“We found the team out, I wasn’t in it and I just talked to my close mates like Dan Biggar and Jonathan Davies. They said to me: ‘We’ve all been here – go away and prove to the coaches why you should be in the team.’ That’s all I could do, because he [Wayne Pivac] wasn’t going to say: ‘Ah,