Steve Thompson's Blog by Steve_Thompson

Hi everyone! Hope you are well. Sorry it’s been a while since my last blog and so much has happened. A week of warm weather pre-Six Nations training in Portugal… not really. It turned out to be cold and wet - you could tell the English were there. It was a great week for the squad to get some good time together though and for us to prepare for the Welsh game. It was a low contact week as we had a lot of battered and bruised lads after the European round of games. It was good to be able to train without the pressure of a game that weekend. We flew back on the Friday and were back in camp on the Saturday evening because of the Welsh game being on the following Friday. The training week went really well and you could feel the intensity building as the week went on. I love playing at the Millennium Stadium and it’s even better winning there too!!!

After the game I drove straight back to Northampton as I had my little one for the weekend and my mate was opening a new shop; it’s called “Pampered Soles”. It’s one of those places where you put your feet into a tank of fish and they eat the dead skin off them!!! As I suffer from bad psoriasis, the standard joke with my mates is I should be having a full body bath! But I must admit I put my arm in and it worked on that. The fish came straight up to a patch and within a few minutes had eaten the affected area till it was smooth. There was a great feeling in the camp after the win in Wales, but we knew the Italians were going to give us a tough match especially after the way they had chucked away their chance of beating Ireland. I think we knew we had it in us to beat the Italians by a few points, but did not think we would put 50 odd points on them.

There has been a lot said about the Ashton dive and my own opinion is as long as he keeps scoring tries at the rate he is, he can do what he wants. I’m just jealous that I can’t dive that high and if I could, I would break something once I hit the ground!!!! I’ve been back at Leeds this week, to get some game time (more on that next time). Then it’s straight back into the England camp to hopefully be involved against the French. That is going to be a battle and a half at Twickenham this weekend.