After the third round of games in the 2013 Six Nations we now have a better understanding of which players may be going to the Lions. In this article another 4 players will be chosen in the same manner as the rules established by last week's article:
The aim of this article and articles in the following weeks is to pick a player from each of the four home nations that have impressed throughout the Six Nations. In other words, players may have impressed before the Six Nations tournament but may not be included within these predictions/selections as they have had a dip in form or were injured whilst these games were being played.
In the first article 8 players were chosen that article can be found
here. This week another 4 players will be selected as judged from the Italy-Wales, England-France and Scotland-Ireland games. We start with England... England After their win against a French team that quite frankly self-destructed, England are still on their way to their first Grand Slam since 2003. They are easily favourites for the championship at this moment in time.
Manu Tuilagi (Centre)
Tuilagi was not picked after the first couple of games simply because he had not featured enough and it was difficult to assess his form. His performance against France a couple of weekends ago shows that he is still a class player. He is strong, quick and is usually fairly clean for a player that comes from Samoa. He's already scored 10 tries in only 19 caps for England; out of the 9 games he's scored International tries in England have won 8 of them. Perhaps more than any other player Tuilagi represents the mentality of Lancaster's England side. After all, Tuilagi is a fairly reformed character; it was less than two years ago that he was making headlines for punching Chris Ashton and jumping off boats in New Zealand. Tuilagi is still a young player (he's only 21 despite being nearly 18 stone) and does occasionally show patches of immaturity although he has certainly improved. Of course, his history of indiscipline will be remembered by Gatland but most pundits and rugby fans seem to think that Tuilagi will be one of the first names on the team sheet due to his destructive style of play.