• Injury to Wales hooker Ken Owens opens door to England captain • Neil Jenkins: Ken misses big Scarlets game but we hope he will be OK for Lions

The England captain, Dylan Hartley, is in line for a call-up to the British & Irish Lions tour of New Zealand if Ken Owens fails to recover from an ankle injury.

Owens sustained the injury training with his region, the Scarlets, this week and will be assessed by the Lions before the squad leaves on Sunday for a training camp in Dublin. He has been ruled out of the Scarlets’ Pro12 semi-final against Leinster on Friday night and, should they win, also the final on 27 May.

Success for unprepared Lions would be despite, not thanks to, administrators | The Breakdown Read more

He was examined by the Lions medical team this week and if he is ruled unfit for two weeks or more, the Lions head coach, Warren Gatland, would have to decide whether to replace him, with the squad leaving for New Zealand on 29 May.

Hartley missed out on a Lions tour in 2013 after being sent off in the Premiership final and banned, and he was one of the major omissions when the Lions squad was announced last month. While the tourists have not published the standby list of players, the Northampton forward, who was born in New Zealand, is the most experienced option at hooker.

If Owens were ruled out of the first match of the tour on 3 June but remained in the squad, the Lions would fall foul of World Rugby’s regulations governing front-row replacements should one of the other two hookers, Jamie George and Rory Best, sustain an injury, the dilemma England faced when overlooking Hartley for the 2015 World Cup, with the forward suspended for the first match.

“Ken is missing a big game for the Scarlets but with a bit of luck he will be OK for the tour,” the Lions skills coach, Neil Jenkins, said. “Players do get injured but we hope he will be fine, if not for the final then for the Lions. We will wait and see. You will have to ask Warren about who is on standby. Gats and the medical staff will have a chat and speak to the Scarlets to see where Ken is at. Let’s hope he is able to take his place on the tour.”

Owens was chosen ahead of Hartley for the tour along with the England reserve hooker, George, and the Ireland captain, Best, who was called up in 2013 when Hartley was ruled out by a long suspension.

When he announced his squad, Gatland hinted the final choice had been between Hartley, the only captain of one of the four home unions not in the 41, and George, who came off the bench early in the second half for England regularly in this year’s Six Nations. “Rory and Ken had great Six Nations and we could not leave out Jamie, who has done well off the bench and playing for Saracens,” he said.

“We had a long and lively discussion and Dylan is very unlucky not to be going. He has done a great job for England since he has captained the team. There is no doubt about his leadership qualities. It was always going to be a tough call and someone was always going to be disappointed.”

If Owens pulls out and Hartley is not called up, it would be more than a snub to a player who has captained England to the Six Nations title in the past two seasons. It would be an indication that his original omission was based on more than just current form, given the strong way he has reacted for his club since he was left out.

In December, Gatland named Hartley as a contender for the captaincy and a few days later the hooker was sent off for striking the Leinster flanker Sean O’Brien, who is in the Lions squad, during the European Champions Cup match at Northampton.

The leading contender after Hartley is Ireland’s Sean Cronin, who is some way ahead of Scotland’s Ross Ford and Wales’s Scott Baldwin. Given the presence of the relatively inexperienced George in the squad, England’s Luke Cowan-Dickie and Tommy Taylor are the longest of shots.