England prop Tom Burgess is as happy as a pig in mud and he should know giving his farming antics.
The hulking South Sydney prop hopes to bring home the bacon in Saturday’s World Cup quarter-final against Papua New Guinea. He’s been spending time on TV star Kelvin Fletcher’s farm in between international duties. Burgess is big mates with the ex-Emmerdale actor and Strictly winner who’s swapped acting and dancing shoes to run a Peak District farm.
Fletcher and his family feature on the BBC show Kelvin’s Big Farming Adventure. Burgess, 30, has been happy to muck in - and joked how he could be grafting there again after grappling with PNG’s forwards this weekend. He said: “It’s going well for Kelvin. I’ve been down recently and on a Sunday it’s going to be my farm day.
“Every Sunday after a game, it’s going to be a bit of active recovery. I’ll go to the farm and chase a few sheep around, get on the pigs and feed them. It’s good for the soul. Pigs and rugby league players are pretty similar to deal with, to be fair. There’s a few in our team that are like pigs - Victor Radley and Elliott Whitehead. But that’s a compliment for Victor as he loves them: he’s got a tattoo of a pig on his calf.”
Burgess, Radley and Whitehead will bring the grunt in England’s pack as they bid to make the physical Papuans squeal in Wigan and avoid a shock exit.
“I played for Great Britain against PNG in 2019 in Port Moresby, so we know what they’re going to bring,” he recalled, after the Lions were stunned 28-10.
“They’ll keep coming all day. We were ahead in that game for a while but they rolled us. We had a few people get injured and knocked out. That’s maybe why we fell away. That’s what they’re going to bring. But we’ve real belief in this squad.”
Burgess scored twice in Saturday’s 94-4 rout of Greece and the towering front-row admits he was keen to grab an unlikely treble. He said: “I don’t like to look like I’m sniffing for tries. But I’ll be honest, I was. It would’ve been pretty cool to get a hat-trick, even though it’s not my job to score tries. When it was 10-4 after 20 minutes, I thought, ‘We’re going to have to get running hard again here.’
“That’s what I tried to do when I came back on. That’s what we needed to get back to. I’m an older player now. I know what works in games and we’ve just been building for this week.”
England boss Shaun Wane has left out record try-scorer Ryan Hall and Canterbury prop Luke Thompson from his 19-man squad but Kai Pearce-Paul retains his place after debuting against Greece. Sam Tomkins, Kallum Watkins, Whitehead, Herbie Farnworth and Michael McIlorum all return after sitting out last weekend.
England 19-man squad: Tomkins, Makinson, Watkins, Farnworth, Welsby, Williams, Burgess, McIlorum, Whitehead, Bateman, Radley, Young, Knowles, Lees, Cooper, Hill, McMeeken, Sneyd, Pearce-Paul.
