Jack Willis: Ireland’s loss is England’s gain

Could Jack Willis be the one that got away from Ireland? Wasps defence coach Ian Costello regrets he did not get to the English Premiership’s hottest property sooner than he did.

Few will have been more pleased at the uncapped back-rower’s call-up for Eddie Jones’s England squad on Monday than former Munster assistant coach Costello, who works closely with Willis in his defensive leadership group at Wasps.

Costello told the Irish Examiner he wished he had joined Wasps sooner than he did to persuade the Premiership’s leading turnover exponent to declare for Ireland. 

By the time he had moved to the Coventry-based club after two seasons as Nottingham head coach in the summer of 2018, Willis, now 23, had already set his sights on wearing the Red Rose. He had been selected for England’s summer tour to South Africa only to miss out through injury.

“You know he’s got Irish roots? He’s about 25 per cent and if I’d have come to Wasps earlier I’d have done everything to get him to an Irish province and drag him back to Ireland,” Costello said.

Ireland’s loss is very much England’s gain, Costello believes of the player who was instrumental in Wasps reaching last Saturday’s Premiership final, only to lose to Exeter Chiefs..

“He’s a very strong character, very grounded, very humble. He’s a product of the Wasps academy and he and his brother Tom are cut from the same cloth. They’re just so tough, so robust, and they’re such competitors.

“Jack is a very, very rounded player and he gets accolades for his jackal work and in my opinion you’d have to show me someone in the world who’s better than him. I’m saying that quite objectively and I’m comfortable standing over that. When you watch him every day in training and you see he has had 45, 46 turnovers in the Premiership.

“I haven’t seen anybody better. That is absolute X-factor but he works very, very hard on it. Matt Everard is our skills coach who does all the breakdown work and he does a huge amount of that work with Jack, so he puts an awful amount of time and effort into his game and if he doesn’t get selected this November I don’t know what he has to do to be honest.

“He’s a quality player, a quality character and a quality individual but he likes to put on a really bad fake Irish accent when I’m talking to him, a real Hollywood leprechaun accent so whatever his connections are he hasn’t really nailed it yet.” end