Both Van Poortvliet and Steward, known to Borthwick from his time at Leicester Tigers, were regular starters last year.

However, scrum-half Van Poortvliet suffered a tournament-ending injury before a ball was kicked at the World Cup, while Furbank took over the number 15 jersey from Steward during this year’s Six Nations.

“Jack is a player that was playing a lot of games for England prior to the World Cup in 2023 and then had that nasty injury,” Borthwick told BBC Radio 5 Live.

“He has worked exceptionally hard to come back from that.

“He had a couple of niggles last season and probably wasn’t quite at 100% but from what I have seen in training the last couple of weeks, the speed of ball Jack brings to the attacking game is exceptional and he is right up to his very best.”

England have shown signs of progress in their attacking intent and have led late on in each of their past four defeats.

Borthwick’s plan of kicking for both the posts and territory in a controlled performance nearly paid dividends against the Boks at the World Cup before a late Handre Pollard penalty denied them a spot in back-to-back finals.

The inclusion of Steward – a reassuring presence in the backfield and under the high ball – suggests England could be planning to kick for the skies to stifle their visitors and play for territory.

Borthwick added: “It is the right time to bring Freddie in for this game. He has trained really well and played really well for his club so far this season. George is available and I’m pleased with what he has done in the last couple of weeks but I felt it was a physical game for him last week.

“South Africa kick more contestable kicks than anybody else in the world. It means you have to be very good under the high ball and have to be good in chasing the high ball.”

Van Poortvliet, meanwhile, is a strong box-kicker and will try to manoeuvre England into better areas on the field as well as spotting opportunities to throw the ball wide for Marcus Smith to threaten the gainline.

The home crowd has yearned for more attacking rugby in recent weeks and, although England have gone some way towards delivering that, perhaps the best opportunity to get over the line against the world champions is to revert to type and play a controlled game.

Bob Pockrass

FOX NASCAR Insider

Tony Stewart has spent the past couple of years training himself to drive a car that goes from 0 to 330 mph in a matter of seconds.

He’ll admit that it took him a while for his brain to process information as quickly as required in a dragster. Does that mean he can process everything quickly, now?

He’s not sure. Ask the three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion about processing changing diapers, and he laughs about what his next challenge in the upcoming days.

“I’m trying to find every and any way I can to get out of having to change diapers,” Stewart said in an interview a few weeks ago. “But my wife is a very strong-willed woman, and she has assured me that I am not, under any circumstances, getting out of these responsibilities as a father and a parent.

“And I don’t blame her. It’s part of it.”

Stewart’s wife, Leah, is due in the next couple of weeks and the pending birth is the most exciting thing in the life of the NASCAR Hall of Fame driver. When they decided they wanted to start a family, Leah opted to step out of her top fuel car and Stewart, still a relative newbie in the drag racing world, stepped in.

It hasn’t been easy. Like any competitor, Stewart wants to consistently vie for wins. But he has embraced this new racing life. His NASCAR racing days in the rear-view mirror, Stewart has found joy in the challenge of competing in a totally new discipline where the car goes from 0 to 100 mph in 60 feet on its way to a top speed of 334 mph. 

“The car is going down the race track, and your brain’s behind it going, ‘Wait a minute, what’s going on? And how do I get caught up?’” Stewart said. “But like anything else — if you want to lift weights, you’ve got to work up to it. Your brain has the ability to do exactly the same thing. It is caught up now in the car.

“I know what the car is doing. If it moves, I know where it’s at. I know what to do to respond to it, but it took a while for my brain to get used to processing information as fast as it’s happening in a dragster.”

Heading into this weekend’s National Hot Rod Association season finale at the Pomona (Calif.) Dragstrip, Stewart sits 10th in the standings, having failed to advance out of the first round in 10 of 19 events this year. He has made the finals once, with his best finish a runner-up at Sonoma. He is a candidate for Rookie of the Year, but the season hasn’t gone as well as he wished.

“I’d like to say it’s going great,” Stewart said. “But it’s been a struggle this year. … . It was a big learning curve for me as a driver, for the team and the crew to tune the car to sit there and figure out how to make the car run better and perform the way that they need to perform.”

Stewart spent one year racing a top alcohol dragster and this year moved to the top fuel category. He has three victories in the top alcohol division.

“I thought at the beginning of the season that I, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was going to be the weak link of the team,” Stewart said. “I felt like the team was going to be better suited to win rounds and try to win races than I was going to be capable of at that time.

“Luckily, I’ve got a great wife that’s a great teacher, and I got up to speed fairly quickly on what I need to do as a driver to drive the car. We’ve just struggled.”

For Stewart, it’s the mindset that is the biggest difference between his former racing life and current one. He was used to 3.5-hour races. Now he does races in 3.5 seconds. 

“I’d say on the sprint car and the NASCAR side of things. the driver usually ends up being 70 percent of the equation of the success of it,” Stewart said. “That’s because of what they do with their hands and feet in the car, and where they’re lifting and how they’re driving the race car.

“They can manipulate the race car a little bit to a certain degree and make up for what it’s not doing that they need it to do. The NHRA side is opposite of that. It’s 70 percent of the tuners and 30 percent the drivers, There’s nothing I can do as a driver to make it go faster, but there’s about 20 ways every run that I can screw it up and slow it down or cause something catastrophic with the engine.”

Among the challenges were a change in chassis specs that no one knew how they would impact the performance. And then there was something else.

“Obviously, you know, not having Leah in the car and adding a driver that’s a little heavier in the race car, we knew that would be a factor to some degree, just not sure how big of a factor that was going to be,” Stewart said.

Stewart doesn’t know whether he will run in place of his wife at the start of next season. The NHRA has adopted rules for how points would be allocated if a driver uses a substitute driver for part of a season because of a driver’s pregnancy or fertility treatment. Those rules would allow, in certain situations, for the points earned by the replacement driver to go to the primary driver’s season total.

“Obviously I’m not a woman, and I have no idea what childbirth is like and what it takes to recover from that,” Stewart said. “I’m learning more and reading more about it, and it’s not an easy journey to get back to the forum before you get pregnant.

“We’re still trying to figure that out, but it’s ultimately going to be Leah’s decision. The reason I’m driving the car this year is because I’m just the replacement driver. I’ve told everyone, I’ll drive the car until she’s ready to come back. It is ultimately her race car and her race team, and when she wants to get back in that car, it’s going to be sitting there for her.”

Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass.

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Tony Stewart

TIGER WOODS’ Olympic champ ex-girlfriend Lindsey Vonn has come out of retirement aged 40.

The American retired in February 2019 but has announced her competitive comeback having had successful knee surgery in April.

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Vonn admitted she was plotting a return to skiing in July.

It has now been revealed she will mark her return to competition, following a five-year absence, at the World Cup opener in Solden, Austria.

The U.S. Ski and Snowboard Organisation announced that Vonn would be actively competing again following several injuries.

She celebrated the news in an Instagram post where she showed off a video of her skiing.

Her beaming caption read: “Well, it’s off to Colorado…. I hope the @usskiteam uniform still fits…”

Away from the sport, Vonn’s fame has been boosted by posing nude and her much-publicised love life.

In 2013, Vonn became part of a sporting power coupe when she began dating golfer Woods, who she met at a charity event a year earlier.

She was often seen on the PGA Tour cheering her beau, until they broke up in 2015.

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Woods later said of split: “Well, with Lindsey, what was hard is we never had time together.

“And I can’t travel because I have the kids—my off weeks, I’m devoted to my kids—and I have to be here.”

Vonn is a three-time Olympic medallist, including gold in downhill skiing at the Winter Games in Vancouver in 2010.

She also took bronze in the Super-G in Canada.

She later claimed another downhill bronze in Pyeongchang in 2018.

In 2011, Vonn received the Laureus World Sportswoman of the Year award.

After Woods, Vonn was linked with NFL coach Kenan Smith, and dated NHL star P.K. Subban.

She looked set to marry the ice hockey star, when they got engaged, bought a £5.2million Beverly Hills home together.

However, they announced their surprising split on Instagram in 2020.

Since 2021, Vonn has been dating Diego Osorio, co-founder of tequila company Lobos 1707, which received investment from LeBron James.

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NEW YORK – James Llontop has seen the hype surrounding his Saturday opponent.

In some ways, how could he not? Brazil’s Mauricio Ruffy is part of the upstart Fighting Nerds gym that quickly has taken the MMA world by storm. Not only has the team found a way to use a playful gimmick – the classic nerd-as-hidden-in-plain-sight-tough-guy trope – to appeal to fans, but its fighters have been near-flawless in 2024 in the UFC.

Ruffy (10-1 MMA, 1-0 UFC) is who stands between Llontop (14-4 MMA, 0-2 UFC) and his first UFC win at UFC 309 (pay-per-view, ESPNews/Hulu/FX, ESPN+) at Madison Square Garden in New York. For Llontop, from Peru, to pull it off, it will mean a massive upset against a 10-1 betting favorite.

“I’m coming with a different mentality, different kind of energy, different kind of preparation for this fight, and he’s going to find out that we have a lot of great warriors in Peru,” Llontop said at Wednesday’s UFC 309 media day in New York.

But Ruffy is from Brazil, known for fighting warriors of its own. All 10 of his wins are knockouts, including one on DWCS to get into the UFC. Once there, he knocked out Jamie Mullarkey in May with a flying knee to get his promotional tenure started with an extra $50,000. He quickly drew comparisons to the type of skills Conor McGregor showed when he was on the rise, before he mostly bowed out of the sport.

Llontop sees it, but thinks he has the antidote after he stepped in for Charlie Campbell on short notice. Ruffy is a 10-1 betting favorite.

“I think there’s some similarities there (to McGregor), but I think this kind of fighter, what you need to do is you can’t let them fight,” Llontop said. “You need to actually pressure him from start to finish, and that’s what I’m going to do.”

Check out Llontop’s full interview in the video above.

For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC 309.

Taylor Fritz boosted his hopes of reaching the last four of the ATP Finals with a comeback victory against Australia’s Alex de Minaur.

De Minaur needed to defeat the American fifth seed in straight sets for any chance of progressing to the semi-finals in Turin, Italy.

However, his hopes were crushed when Fritz stole the second set against the run of play.

Fritz, who went on to win 5-7 6-4 6-3, will progress to the last four of the season-ending tournament if Jannik Sinner beats Daniil Medvedev later on Thursday.

If 2020 champion Medvedev wins in straight sets, the Russian will advance as group winner ahead of Italy’s world number one Sinner, while Fritz will miss out.

“All of us are pretty beat up but if I’m in the semi-finals of the world tour finals then I’ve got energy to give,” said Fritz.

Seventh seed De Minaur, although labouring through his opening service games, was the first to break when he ended a superb rally with a clever cross-court winner for a 4-3 lead.

Fritz was quick to respond, levelling in the next game before De Minaur broke again and served out the opening set as his opponent became increasingly frustrated, complaining to the umpire about flash photography in the arena.

The US Open runner-up had to fend off two break points in the second set, while De Minaur, in comparison, looked comfortable on serve with three love holds.

That was until Fritz increased his intensity and seized his opportunity at 5-4 to end De Minaur’s season.

With his tournament essentially over, De Minaur continued to falter as Fritz surged and he wrapped up the victory with an ace after two hours and eight minutes.

“He was all over me. What I did a great job of was towards the end of the second set I started to find my serve, I started serving much better,” Fritz said.

“It just gave me a little bit of comfort to stay in the match and not be under so much pressure. It was still incredibly tough.”