Jones would have been worth the wait – RFU

EDDIE Jones would have become England coach even if he had insisted on seeing out the first year of his contract with the Stormers, Rugby Football Union (RFU) chief executive Ian Ritchie said.

Ritchie, whose own position was in some doubt after England’s disastrous first-round exit at last year’s World Cup they hosted, said he knew Jones would bring a certain amount of arrogance, a very different trait to his down-to-earth predecessor, Stuart Lancaster.

That, allied to Australian Jones’s sublime coaching and motivational skills, has proven a triumphant combination as England have gone through this year winning all 13 tests, including the Six Nations grand slam and a historic 3-0 series win in Australia.

Ritchie said the RFU were prepared to wait for their man had Jones, 56, and the Stormers insisted on him staying for at least a season.

As a fallback option they would have installed Lancaster’s assistants – Andy Farrell, Mike Catt and Graham Rowntree – as caretaker coaches.

“If it had been absolutely impossible and we couldn’t have done it, we would still have gone for the longer-term option and had some sort of holding operation,” Ritchie said of the alternative of the troika staying on.

“That was always a possibility. That’s what we would have done,” Ritchie, formerly chief executive of the All England Club responsible for running Wimbledon, said.

He thought at first on landing in Cape Town last November he had no chance of securing Jones’s signature simply because of the breathtaking scenery.

Jones, who had boosted his stature with his handling of Japan at the World Cup, where they pulled off one of the great sporting upsets in defeating two-time world champions South Africa, proved more malleable than he had feared.

“The two of us sat in that hotel room for four hours just talking through everything,” Ritchie, who took on his present role in 2011, said.

“It was clear he was interested in the job. It wasn’t as if I was trying to persuade someone who was rampantly unwilling to do it.”