Read England Saxons captain Will Skinner's twice weekly Barclays Churchill Cup diary.

The coaches announced the squad to play Ireland A yesterday and they've made quite a few changes.

The biggest one for me is that I'm not involved. I've had a chat with Steve Bates, our head coach, and I understand where he's coming from but obviously that doesn't stop me being disappointed.

It's their job to try and get the balance right between giving a few more guys a chance while also making sure that they don't disrupt the team too much.

Steff Armitage is starting at seven, he's a great player and he deserves his chance. I only cover one position and that's the risk of being a specialist. If you're not starting, often you won't even make the bench.

But on a positive note, my roomy Tom Guest is in at number 8 and another Quin, Ugo Monye, is starting on the wing too. I know how good Guesty is off the back of the scrum and hopefully he'll get a chance to use his pace too.

We played Ireland A in the Six Nations in February and we saw them play their pool game against the USA on Wednesday so we know a fair bit about them. They ran in a few tries against the Americans, plus they've got a very strong back row, with guys like Neil Best and Johnny O'Connor who used to be at Wasps. Their captain Bob Casey is at London Irish where he plays under one of our coaches, Toby Booth - who claims to have taught him everything he knows!

He may be only joking, but it's useful to have information on your opponents. I know Mike Ross to, one of their props, he used to be at Quins. Equally, it can work two ways as they have a better idea what to expect from us.

We had a well earned rest on Wednesday so we're all feeling pretty good today. We went jet boating on the Niagara River and then stopped off at Niagara Falls, which was really spectacular, although Ugo wimped out and stayed at the hotel with a few of the guys who'd been there before on previous trips. It's good to get away from rugby sometimes and the jet boating was good fun, we got completely soaked which everyone apart from Guesty enjoyed - he was more worried about getting his new shorts wet!

Despite our bus breaking down, we managed to make it back for the tournament fundraising event that evening. Rugby Canada put on a kind of casino night for all the other teams, which appealed to some of the boys. On the way home a group of us managed to fit in was a trip up the CN Tower. The views over the city at dusk were just fantastic, although I have to admit that standing on the glass floor next to Ollie Smith jumping up and down gave me vertigo and I had to sit down. But I wasn't alone, Ryan Lamb seemed to be sweating an awful lot in the glass lift on the way up...

Tomorrow we have our team run in the morning and some time to rest in the afternoon before going down to watch the Toronto Blue Jays (baseball) batting practice. A lot of the guys, especially George Chuter and Guesty are big fans of American sports so they've been trying to get me up to speed. We're just watching them warm up for a game against the Chicago Cubs later that evening really but there might be a chance we'll get to have a go. Although, seeing the speed those guys pitch, I think I'll leave that to Adrian (Jarvis), he was a useful cricketer so I reckon that's a good enough reason to send him up first!

Cheers

Will