‘I thought everyone should be as obsessive as I was’: Eddie Jones on 5am alarms and staying hungry
Eddie Jones laughs when I ask him if he has ever tried therapy. Turns out I’m not the only one who has suggested it. Jones recently hired a forensic psychiatrist to work with his coaching team on their communication skills. “I don’t have therapy with her,” he says, “but I think sometimes she thinks I should.”
I’m surprised he hasn’t tried. Jones’s new book, Leadership, shows how he roams through conversations with football, cricket, basketball and Australian rules football coaches, multinational chief executives, investment bankers, acting coaches and school teachers looking for every last little nugget that might make him a better coach. Jones is restlessly obsessive about it. If the book has a single line that seems to sum him up, it’s this: “The only reliable advantage we’ve got in life, in business or sport, is to learn faster than the opposition.” He spends a lot of time trying to find the edge that will help him do exactly that.
Jones sits down to start work at 5am each morning. It has, he says, been a long time since he got his eight hours of decent sleep. “I normally get four or five, then, maybe, have a nap later in the day.” But early morning “is the best time of the day for thinking, mate, you’re uninterrupted, you don’t have things buzzing, or clicking”. Unless you’re working for him. Then you can expect to get dawn emails and WhatsApp messages. “Have a look at this? What do you think?” He says he’s got better at this. He doesn’t expect immediate responses any more. “In the old days I used to go around putting notes under people’s doors.
“That’s a thing I’ve got to understand,” Jones goes on to say. “When I first started coaching I thought everyone should be as driven, and as obsessive, as I was. Now I understand that people have their own rhythms.”
Not everyone who has worked with him will agree. England have churned through a lot of assistant coaches and support staff since Jones took over. He sounds like an exacting boss. One former employee, who moved on from his job in Jones’s first year, once described it as like working for Napoleon, only, he guessed, with more swearing.
In Leadership, Jones mentions a lot of other coaches. He is good friends with Celtic’s Ange Postecoglou and the basketball coach Brian Goorjian, has regular conversations with Gareth Southgate, David Moyes and Dave Brailsford. It’s interesting that he doesn’t mention Trevor Bayliss since he and Jones took over English national teams at the same time, and in similar circumstances. They are similar ages and from the same part of the world, New South Wales. They even used to play Grade cricket against each other in the 1980s. “We caught up three or four times during his tenure,” says Jones, who already knows where I’m going with the question.
For all their similarities, he and Bayliss couldn’t be more different in their approaches to coaching. Bayliss was so laidback as England head coach that when he left the post the English press gave him a Yucca plant, a scented candle and a CD of ambient music. “Trevor was one of those guys who sat back and smelled the environment, and then gave it whatever he thought it needed,” Jones says. The reason it worked so well, he reckons, was because of Bayliss’s partnership with his assistant, Paul Farbrace. “They were a great combination. Farbrace was energetic and direct with the team, while Trevor sat back and created a good environment.”
So does Jones have a sidekick to work with? He goes back to Steve Borthwick. “He was a great right-hand man.” But Borthwick left England last year. “Recently?” he says, “the last four or five years, I’ve been lucky to have Neil Craig.”
Craig is interesting. He is the Rugby Football Union’s head of high performance, has a background in Aussie rules and cycling. By his own admission, he doesn’t know a whole lot about rugby. In the book Jones says Craig’s role is “to tell the truth and also to help me coach the coaches”. Craig is the one who pulls Jones up on his behaviour. “Sometimes we’ll finish a meeting and he’ll say: ‘Maybe you went a bit hard there.’ And I listen to him, and I take advice from him.” At 61, Jones says, he’s still maturing as a coach. “And he’s helped me no end.”
There is a fascinating little video interview with Matt Giteau on YouTube in which he talks about how Eddie is “still someone that scares me” 15 years after they last worked together. He talks about him with a mix of love, loyalty, fear and respect. Back when Jones was coaching Japan, he used to wonder why some of the players were so reluctant to speak up in meetings. It was only later that he realised, and after the team psychologist pointed it out, that it was because they were intimidated by him. If Jones has softened since, he’s still hard enough.
If you want to understand Jones, the way he works and why he succeeds, you need to know where he comes from. He believes that himself. Listen to him describe the differences between him and Bayliss: “He was a country boy and I was from the city. He’s laconic and I’m much more aggressive. I want to run the show.”
So how does Jones’s own upbringing shape him? “Mine’s probably pretty obvious. I was half-Japanese, half-Australian in a white Australian society where, if you weren’t good at sport, you weren’t considered to be worthy of the group, and I wanted to be part of the group,” he says. “I was little, and I looked different, but I wanted to be good at sport, so I had to find a way. I didn’t have any athletic gifts, so I became a competitor. I fought.” He is still fighting to prove himself now. It’s one of the reasons he took on the England job, and why he’s still tickled, six years later, by the idea of an Australian running the England team. “I think it is bloody fascinating, because this is the home of rugby and Australia is, or at least was, seen as an outpost.”
It’s also why Jones says his favourite moments in coaching are the ones “when everyone thinks you’re an idiot, everyone thinks they know better than you”. It’s an interesting way of putting it. I’m not sure anyone who’s ever spoken to Jones would describe him as an idiot. “But we’re involved in something that everyone thinks they know,” he says. “One of the great examples, we had Roy Hodgson in the last Six Nations. He’s 74, he came into dinner and his first statement was: ‘Boys, I’m still trying to work out what a good coach is.’ And I think that’s so true. Everyone thinks they know, but the people who are really involved in this business, we know that we don’t. And I think that keeps driving me.”
That, and the feeling he gets in those last few moments before kickoff. “That’s the elixir, that bit where you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen, it is the thing that keeps you in it.” He had it again before England played South Africa in the autumn. “We’ve got four young blokes on the bus and they don’t know what the game is going to be like, we’ve prepared, we’ve talked to them, the senior players have talked to them, but you actually don’t know how they’re going to handle it.” He is addicted to the bit that’s still beyond his control.
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The book comes at an interesting time, after England finished fifth in this year’s Six Nations. Jones has been preoccupied with figuring out what went wrong and how to put it right. His answer is characteristic. He thinks some of his squad started to feel entitled. It happens, he says. “You take over a team when they’re not doing well. You come in, you’ve got this great energy, and you find the other people who have the sort of same energy, same desire, same mentality, and if you say the right things, and get the right picture in their heads, then you create a winning team. And as soon as you win – and this has happened in every team I’ve had – then people don’t want to work as hard.”
So the process starts again. Only second time around it’s harder “because you’ve got to get rid of those same players who have been successful for you. And they’re still really good players, but they don’t have that same mentality, that fight.” Jones dropped a number of senior players – George Ford, Mako and Billy Vunipola – from his squad for the autumn internationals. Will he pick them again? “We’ll just wait and see. Again, it’s about their mentality, if they want to keep improving, want to keep getting better, and are prepared to do those hard yards. They are the things we need to see.”
Entitlement isn’t just an English problem, he says, “but I think maybe there are factors here that exacerbate it. If you’re an England rugby player here and you play a couple of Tests you’ll never have to worry about playing top-level rugby again. There’s 13 professional teams so you can find a spot somewhere and keep playing.” The great teams are the ones who keep winning year after year. “It’s rare because teams get comfortable. They want to settle. That’s the hardest thing to keep driving.”
Jones believes conflict is healthy. “I think I understand that it’s the only way you keep winning,” he says. “Because whenever you’re comfortable, everyone wants to take a short cut, don’t they?” Again he goes back to his past. “My father left school when he was 15 to work in a coalmine, so I’ve had a much easier life than he’s had, and my daughter has had a much easier life than I’ve had. Every life gets easier, that’s how it is, because we want life to be comfortable. But to achieve things that take effort outside of that is uncomfortable.”
Jones is always looking for the balance between supporting his players and staff, and challenging them, between making them feel at ease, and making them feel on edge. I know from my own small experience of his charity work that Jones can also be tremendously kind and thoughtful.
One of the solutions to England’s entitlement problem, Jones says, was to