Harlequins sweating on Danny Care fitness

28 April 2017 10:54

Harlequins are to monitor the fitness of Danny Care after the England scrum-half was replaced early in Friday night's 32-13 Aviva Premiership victory over Wasps.

Care suffered a stomach muscle injury in the 26th minute at Twickenham Stoop to give England head coach Eddie Jones a scare ahead of the June tour to Argentina.

The Quins captain has been picked as one of only two scrum-halves to face the Pumas over two Tests and Jones watched from the stands as he left the field.

"Danny has an oblique injury and struggled to run it off. He's probably stretched it and may have pulled it," director of rugby John Kingston said.

"There are eight days until the next game so we'll have to see how he scrubs up, but we don't know at this stage."

Care's injury failed to take the shine off Nick Evans' scripted Twickenham Stoop farewell as the Kiwi fly-half marked his final home appearance with a 22-point haul and man-of-the-match display in front of his family.

Evans retires at the end of the season and the former All Black was instrumental in keeping alive the club's Champions Cup qualification hopes ahead of next Saturday's Premiership finale at Northampton.

"Nick is a legend at Harlequins. For me there are very few of those, but he's one of them. It was nice to see the reception he got from the fans," Kingston said.

"Knowing him, you'd have a bet on him performing like that in his last game here.

"But we've got to back that up next weekend and that's the big thing. We're trying to qualify for the Champions Cup and that will come down to next Saturday.

"We haven't qualified for the competition for three years so if we did it would be brilliant and we will give everything to achieve that."

Wasps missed the opportunity to guarantee a home play-off and face Saracens at the Ricoh Arena on Saturday knowing that defeat could cost them that advantage having led the Premiership for most of the season.

"We didn't get enough possession or territory to cause them problems. Our kicking game was poor and we never built any pressure," director of rugby Dai Young said.

"It wasn't a great performance from us, but give Quins some credit. It was chaos at the tackle area and that wasn't refereed, but that's not why we lost.

"We'll dust ourselves off because there's no point beating ourselves up. We were second best and we know we have to work hard for Saracens."

Source: PA