Sale’s Sanderson insists England should trust in Ford despite loss at London Irish

Sale’s director of rugby, Alex Sanderson, backed George Ford to return to the England squad following the national side’s Six Nations hammering by France.

The fly-half was in action for Sale on Sunday in their 36-18 Premiership defeat at London Irish, having been left out of Steve Borthwick’s squad in favour of Owen Farrell and Marcus Smith.

England, beaten 53-10 by France, finish their Six Nations campaign next weekend against Ireland, who have a chance to complete the grand slam after their own victory against Scotland.

“George will definitely go back and train with England,” Sanderson said. “It looks like Steve’s got a really difficult job now – to rebuild or rotate. If I’m in his shoes I think you fall back to people you know and trust, and George ticks both of those boxes.”

London Irish held off Sale in the second half before putting the game beyond reach with two late scores.

Tries from Hugh O’Sullivan, Agustin Creevy, Lucio Cinti, Tarek Haffar and James Stokes secured a bonus-point victory for the Exiles.

Leicester won 26-5 at Kingsholm to maintain their recent dominance over Gloucester and keep alive their hopes of an end-of-season play-off spot. 

It was Leicester’s sixth consecutive win over Gloucester and their 14th in the last 17 fixtures between the clubs. Their tries came from Mike Brown, Julian Montoya, Ben Youngs and Jasper Wiese, with Handre Pollard adding three conversions. Gloucester’s sole response was a Jonny May try, with this defeat a bitter blow to their play-off hopes.

“It’s a big loss for us and makes it extremely difficult but I don’t think we should be talking about the play-offs but more about playing better," said Gloucester head coach George Skivington. “We wanted to make a statement and I