Simon Amor will no longer coach Sevens side if Team GB make it to Tokyo 2020 Olympics next summer

England attack coach Simon Amor will be able to give his full focus to his role under Eddie Jones as the coronavirus pandemic has scrapped his plans to lead Great Britain at next year’s Olympic Games.

Amor was announced as part of Jones’s backroom staff ahead of this year’s Six Nations, a championship that still needs to be concluded this month after it was put on hold due to the Covid-19 crisis.

This appointment came with an asterisk in that Amor would return to his Sevens commitments for Tokyo 2020, where he had been announced as the Team GB head coach for the men’s side. The Olympics, like most sporting events this summer, were postponed until 2021, though there remains doubt over the international event going ahead at all next summer as countries continue to struggle in getting a grip on the pandemic.

England’s men’s and women’s sides did enough at the enough of 2019 to qualify Team GB for the second consecutive Games, with the men’s side hoping to go one better than the silver medal they claimed at Rio 2016. However, the financial crisis at the Rugby Football Union saw the Sevens programme scrapped earlier this season, leaving the short-format game in turmoil and facing a hugely uncertain future on these shores as its best players departed for 15-a-side and the new 10-a-side rugby.

There has been no formal announcement over Amor’s position as Team GB coach, and Sevens players such as captains Tom Mitchell and Abbie Brown have spoken of their desire to self-fund their path to Tokyo 2020 under the Team GB banner is a financial rescue package can’t be sourced from the governing bodies, but 2006 Commonwealth Games silver medallist Amor confirmed that his commitments are now solely to Jones’s senior squad, with preparations well under way in south-west London for the conclusion of the Six Nations and Autumn Nations Cup as the squad met up for their second three-day training camp.

“I'm focussing 100 per cent on England here,” Amor said. “That's my full focus to help this team become the best it can be.

“It's an incredibly exciting role and I feel incredibly privileged to be in this role, to help this team and work under a master coach in Eddie Jones, learning every single day.

“I'm 100 per cent focussed on this, I'm here with England.”

Amor added: “We have a very diverse coaching team. John Mitchell (defence coach) has some wonderful experiences and has been hugely successful around the world. Matt Proudfoot (forwards coach) has had success with South Africa recently and myself, who comes from a much more unstructured sevens background, so particularly that thinking of how to move the ball to unstructured space is definitely a strength I feel I bring.

“It's a big area for us to keep getting better at.”

The Olympics will clash with the British and Irish Lions tour next summer, with England previously planning a tour of Canada and the United States for those players not selected by Warren Gatland for the series against the Springboks. Had Amor been committed to the Sevens project in Japan, he would likely have been unavailable for the tour of North America, although there remains no certainty that those plans can proceed due to the current pandemic.

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