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Tom Curry rejects England’s World Cup talk and the impact player tag: ‘You’re just good at rugby’ Sale and England flanker Tom Curry has looked ahead to the season, revealing what Courtney Lawes has already brought to Salford and why he wants more big Test rugby in the north. The top line Tom Curry has just been asked whether a back row who plays the way he does, and who has had a rod through his hip and stem cell work since, ought to be thinking about playing some other way by now. He doesn’t take a second over it. “It’s being more diligent, one hundred per cent, off the field of what you do,” he said. “But there’s only one way to get good and stay good, and that’s playing games. So that’s what I want to do.” The man is characteristically as uncompromising in person as he is on the pitch, and the mere idea of leaving anything in the dressing room is simply not in his thinking or vocabulary. No modifications He’s a few days back in at Sale, home from a pre-season camp in Portugal and into the business of chasing teammates who’ve had seven weeks of conditioning on him. There’s no mystery about how a player of his profile spends a summer either, because the fitness staff always know where you are. “They can touch you in all corners of the globe,” he said, cheerfully enough. He hadn’t taken much of a break in any case. “I felt like I didn’t get around to too much at the end of the season, so I thought I’d stay on top of it rather than have a full break.” That’s a diplomatic account of a 2025-26 season that gave him nothing like the rugby he wanted, and he was straight about the frustration of it without looking around for anything to blame. “You can’t make excuses for it. I’ve had it for a while where I can come back and play, and I probably didn’t manage to capture that towards the end of the season. So I’m excited to have this time to fully get onto it, and then we’re on a level playing field again.” Courtney Lawes has talked before about learning to rest himself properly and to manage his own body through a training week, and Curry accepted the principle and then walked past it. “I just want to play games, eighty minutes, just play,” he said. “When you’re playing week in, week out, you understand your schedule. When you’re not doing that as much, you have to pick up during the week, and then it’s that sort of effect.” Lawes, and eleven others Twelve senior players have arrived at Sale this summer, Lawes, Joe Marchant and Alex Lozowski among them, with Nicky Smith and Tomas Francis in the front row and the Fiji pair of Ponipate Loganimasi and Elia Canakaivata out wide and in the back row. “You can’t ignore them, can you?” Curry said of the introductions, before conceding the group has bedded in faster than anyone expected. “It felt like they’ve been here for a few years. I can’t speak highly enough of them.” The Fijians have one thing still coming to them. “I don’t think they know about the Manchester winters yet, so we’re trying to keep that quiet.” Lawes is the one he keeps returning to. He’s 37, he won 105 caps before he retired from Test rugby, he’s spent two seasons at Brive and he came out of international retirement on the day Sale announced him. “He’s still the same, if not better,” Curry said. “He’s more diligent, and chatting to him about certain bits around the breakdown, just the way he speaks and his experiences, will be really cool.” Ask why he’s so hard to categorise, and you get the best line of the morning. “He’s obviously six foot whatever (eight!), but he’s got the skill set of a five foot nine person. You can’t pigeonhole him into a category, because he’s just great at everything.” The quality Sale actually need from him isn’t technical, though. “The biggest thing is how much of a calming influence he is,” Curry said. “He’s very level-headed, and his ability to be consistent and stay at that sort of level is great, and it’s probably what we needed. As a club, we ride high, so to have someone who’s able to bring that is going to be exciting.” For a squad that lost by 71 points at Toulouse in January and by 66 at home to Saracens in April, an even keel is worth a good deal. The players who cost nothing interested him just as much. “The young lads are stepping up now, which is a big barometer of where a club’s at,” he said, nodding at what Northampton have done in bringing a generation through. “The guys coming through now are doing a great job, and just pushing the standards every day makes such a big difference.” PREM Rugby ins and outs: Every confirmed signing and departure ahead of 2026/27 season Short memories Sale finished seventh last season with five wins from 18, 27 points adrift of the play-offs, one victory on the road and no back-to-back league wins all year. Marco Bortolami left as head coach in December after six months, defence coach Byron McGuigan went in March, and Alex Sanderson called it the longest, hardest and most challenging season of his career. Curry wasn’t going back through any of it. “We’d never want to feel like that again,” he said. “That’s kind of crap. But it’s a brand new season, we’re here to get excited about brand new things, and it’s going to be a good crack at it. You take your learnings, of course, but the main thing is how you implement them.” Suggest to him that Sale have underachieved in recent years, however, and he won’t have it. “I wouldn’t go that far,” he said, and when the point was pressed, he made his own. “A lot of people have short memories, especially in my tenure, from where we were nine years ago to where we are now. Obviously, if you have the actual goal of winning, then yes. But you look at where the club’s been previous to that. I think we’re doing an all right job.” On targets, he gave the obligatory answer, then laughed at himself for giving it in the first week of September with ten months of a season in front of him. “It’s winning the Prem, of course it is.” The ambition underneath it was more specific, and it’s about what Sale concede rather than what they score. “I thought we were starting to attack better, but then you look at the way the game’s going and all the scorelines,” he said. “You don’t want high scorelines. I don’t know what the fans want, but we don’t. So we need to evolve that and get that under control as well.” More rugby in the north England beat Fiji 73-8 at the Hill Dickinson Stadium in July, a Fiji home fixture staged at Everton’s 52,000-seat ground on the Liverpool waterfront, and Curry came away wanting a great deal more of the same. “There’s some unbelievable events that can happen in the north,” he said. “I’d like to personally see more. I don’t think it probably happens enough. You’ve got some great occasions, you’ve got some great stadiums, and I think there’s a genuine appetite for that. Fans don’t necessarily want to have to travel four hours every time to watch a game.” Asked whether Sale should take a fixture to the Hill Dickinson themselves, he needed one word: “Definitely.” The same argument covers the playing stock, and he made the point that the north-west has produced coaches and players for years, “and probably ones we don’t really know about”. The next four England play Australia, Japan and New Zealand at Twickenham in November before a Finals Weekend fixture at the end of the month, and every one of those matches will be written up somewhere as a staging post to Australia 2027. Curry declined the framing flat out. “I don’t necessarily think you can start adding World Cup into the conversation, because you look at teams that fly into the World Cup and then you get to the actual tournament and it doesn’t work out,” he said. “There’s genuine evidence for that, so I wouldn’t go that far. They’re important because they’re the next four.” He rates the group he’s in, saying that in terms of player personnel it’s really tight right now, whilst the competition itself is something he’s still working out along with everyone else. Beyond that, he wouldn’t be drawn, and the reason was practical rather than evasive. “It’s hard to speak about when we haven’t played a Prem game.” PREM boss addresses ex-Ireland star’s future: ‘That’s not what we brought him in for’ Sixty minutes or twenty Curry spent much of last season finishing games for England rather than starting them, and there’s a settled view in the game now that closing out a Test is its own specialism. He doesn’t buy a word of it. “I think evolution is a weird one,” he said. “You just want to play your best, and if that’s what the coach wants, that’s what the coach gets. I don’t necessarily think there’s anything that really matters, especially for forwards. Whether you play sixty or twenty, you just play rugby.” Then he took the whole thing apart. “The best guys usually bring the energy off the bench for twenty minutes. It’s not that they bring energy and suddenly they’re good. It’s the same with the starting. If you bring energy from the start, everyone’s suddenly saying, oh, you’re a great starter. You’re just good at rugby.” With Ben Earl scoring twice in Santiago del Estero and Henry Pollock taking a hat-trick in Liverpool, Steve Borthwick has the players to test that theory on him again before Christmas. A balcony over the Obelisco July was three Tests in three countries across three weekends, and he summed the format up in four words. “A lot more planes.” Then, after a beat: “A lot more airports.” He was careful not to rank it against what it replaced, but he misses touring. “I like the old tournament where you play a team and then you get to play them again,” he said. “It felt like an old-school feel where you could back it up, where you have something to compare against from the previous week, and you sometimes develop these personal inter-team rivalries. To go from that to a new challenge, a new set of people, a new stadium, it felt more like a genuine tournament. It was just a different feel.” As for whether the travel was as punishing as it looked from home: “It definitely was not gruelling. You just had to do a bit more stretching.” The stop he’ll remember was the last one. England beat Argentina 31-24 in Santiago del Estero on 18 July, the day before Argentina lost the football World Cup final to Spain in extra time, and the squad’s hotel put them in the middle of the aftermath. “Our balcony overlooked the Obelisk, and it was wild,” he said. “We managed to go out after the final and had a walk around in the crowd, and it was absolutely crazy. To see the passion, and what a sport can do for a nation, is just wow.” He slept, he added, because he’d had the sense to pack earplugs. England’s footballers had lost to Argentina four days before England’s rugby players won there, which gave the locals a week’s worth of material. Asked who had started the banter, Curry was clear. “They started it, one hundred per cent.” Bath, Sunday He was asked about the hip, about finishing games rather than starting them, about his club’s league position and about his country’s World Cup year, and four times the answer came back to the same place. “I just want to play lots and lots of rugby.” Sale meet Bath at the CorpAcq Stadium on Sunday afternoon, Gloucester away the weekend after that, and Bristol at home on 26 September.