Few Australian rugby players have had their Wallabies credentials picked apart in recent times like Harry Wilson.
After bursting onto the scene in 2020 when he made his Test debut under Dave Rennie, Wilson has largely been overlooked despite strong form for Queensland Reds in Super Rugby Pacific, including topping the charts for ball carries in each of the past two seasons.
The Gunnedah-born back-rower played just one Test in 2022, before Eddie Jones went into radio silence midway through last year after initially providing Wilson with feedback he says was helping him improve.
"Throughout the Super Rugby season they were really good, I was getting consistent feedback which was something that I enjoyed and I think it helped me throughout the season quite a bit," Wilson told ESPN from Ballymore, where the Reds are continuing to prepare for the season under new coach Les Kiss.
"But I really only did that first camp [in April] and then when I they announced that second squad I had a missed call [from Jones]; I called him back about five times and then I didn't get any messages from there. So my dealings with him were quite shallow, there weren't much at all.
"And I probably felt for a few of the other boys who I thought should have been there [at the World Cup] but then ended up being on the Baa Baas trip, which was awesome to have them there, but it would have been better to see them in gold."
Wilson's experiences with a hard-to-nail-down Jones have become an all-too-familiar footnote to the now-former Wallabies coach's annus horribilis - one when Australian rugby plunged to even deeper depths.
Quade Cooper, Michael Hooper, Len Ikitau and Andrew Kellaway are among those to have shared their frustrations from either inside or outside the squad, while former Rugby Australia chairman Hamish McLennan also followed Jones to the exit door - albeit not voluntarily.
But amidst the drama and pain, including his own World Cup dream being dashed, Wilson was able to find the silver lining, or linings plural, first in the form of a return to club rugby with Hospital Cup winners Brothers and then a six-week tour of the U.K. with the Barbarians.
"I honestly loved it. It was six weeks through the UK - I had never been there or Europe - which was awesome," Wilson said. "And being coached by Jason Gilmore, who is someone that I love working with and have been coached by quite a bit in the past, also Laurie Fisher, Berrick Barnes and Nathan Grey, it was awesome to learn from them.
"And then six weeks with 10 Japanese boys and another 15 Australian blokes - it was a trip of a lifetime, I honestly had so much fun. And playing the English brand of footy was cool, it's so different to what we play; especially with us playing Baa Baas footy and throwing the ball around, while they were kicking a lot more and had some bigger bodies. It was really good fun, I loved it."
While the Wallabies were battling in out in the heat of southern France, seeing skipper Will Skelton and prop Taniela Tupou go down with training injuries, and then slumping to defeats by Wales and Fiji, which ultimately ended Australia's Rugby World Cup campaign at the pool stage for the first time, Australia's Barbarians contingent was enjoying everything the famed invitational team has to offer.
But it wasn't just off the field where Wilson said he benefited, the No. 8 the latest non-Brumbies player to rave about the coaching of Laurie Fisher and how it has set him on the course of improvement in 2024.
"Not just there [at the breakdown], just his rugby knowledge is pretty cool," Wilson said of Fisher's acumen. "When he was coaching us there, obviously he was doing us forwards and the breakdown work, but just defensively, some of the little cues I got from him were things I'd never thought of, you could really tell how well he knows the game. And the breakdown drills you do at training, they're all so relevant.