Johnston, Foxx, Oates, To'o, Tupou, Coates: Who are the NRL's best 10 wingers for season 2023?
These 10 speedsters will be carving it up on the wings in 2023.
The NSW Waratahs are hopeful injured Wallabies Will Skelton and Nick Phipps will be back to bolster their Super Rugby side against the Sharks after the poor defensive effort last weekend.
Lock Skelton (hamstring) and halfback Phipps (ankle) were late withdrawals from the match against the Lions in Johannesburg, where the Waratahs crashed to a 55-36 loss.
“We’re hopeful that those guys this week can be included,” Tahs’ assistant coach Chris Malone said on Tuesday.
“We have to be smart in how we manage them in order to get them right.
“Saturday is still a fair way away. We’ll be making sure we give them the best possible chance to be ready to go.”
The Waratahs are already missing another influential Wallaby in five-eighth Bernard Foley.
The playmaker was sent home after he was ruled out of a second Super match when still displaying post-concussion symptoms from the head knock he got in a pre-season match almost three weeks ago.
“Bernard has arrived safely back in Australia and that’s the best place for him at the moment,” Malone said.
The Tahs conceded eight tries in their loss to the Lions and will be looking for a vastly improved defensive performance in Durban.
“We expect the Sharks to be very physical and they like to shift the ball around,” Malone said.
He thought the Waratahs needed to be smarter about how they got out of their own 22 after defending for long periods against the Lions.
“We put a lot of pressure on ourselves, we asked ourselves to make a lot of tackles which we didn’t need to make,” he said.
“We asked ourselves to defend inside our 22 for way too long and that’s something we can certainly improve going into the game this weekend.
“I think we had 22 lineouts against us on the weekend and a lot of those were in our own half. You can’t do that against big teams.”
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These 10 speedsters will be carving it up on the wings in 2023.
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