Danny Care desperate to fight his way back into England reckoning with Rugby World Cup on the horizon

For Danny Care and his England career, the writing was not so much on the wall as scrawled across the team whiteboard in lurid marker-pen.

The message, as Stuart Lancaster spelt out his selection for last autumn’s Test against Samoa, simply read: “Ben Youngs.

” Care laughed out loud at the head coach, not through lack of respect but in wry acknowledgement of the likelihood that he would struggle, if Youngs performed strongly, to rejoin the fold.

And so, emphatically, it has proved.

While Youngs, his arch rival at scrum-half, basks in the acclaim of successive man-of-the-match contribu…