Foreign-based players no distraction for Armitage

(Reuters) - Toulon flanker Steffon Armitage said suggestions that Nick Abendanon and his selection would have been a distraction for England's rugby World Cup squad was "insulting". The Rugby Football Union does not allow foreign-based players to be selected for international duty, which led to French-based players Armitage and Abendanon missing out from Stuart Lancaster's squad for England's World Cup campaign. The RFU could have included them by invoking its "exceptional circumstances" rule but decided against it and the move was backed by some players, like Tom Youngs and Tom Wood. England's World Cup ended in disappointment, with the hosts' failure to emerge from the pool stages and is currently the subject of a RFU review by a five-member panel chaired by the governing body's chief executive, Ian Ritchie. "I know them, played against them, and to hear them say we'd be a distraction if selected was pretty insulting," Armitage, who was the 2013-14 European player of the year, told Rugby World. "At the end of the day all we wanted to do was make the team better and I just think it was wrong for players to say what they did. We could have learnt from each other and created more rivalry for places. "The coach has his view in not picking me so all I could do was keep playing rugby. I hoped I might get in but it didn't happen and I had to deal with it." "Twickenham's meant to be a fortress but it didn't work at all, and I think everyone should be disappointed at the way things happened," the 30-year-old said. (Reporting by Shravanth Vijayakumar in Bengaluru; editing by Sudipto Ganguly)