NATIONS2018 Eddie shaken by battle of Hastings
EDDIE JONES says he was physically and verbally abused following the Calcutta Cup defeat.
The England coach appeared to blame Scotland legend Gavin Hastings for sparking the trouble. Jones was booed by Scotland fans post-match but that was nothing, he said, compared to the treatment he received on a train south from Edinburgh the day after.
Travelling standard class, Jones said he was jostled and baited and feared for his safety.
He referred to an interview Hastings had given in which the former Scotland full-back had said how much he would enjoy seeing Jones’s face “rubbed in the dirt” after an England loss.
There was also a reference to the ‘everyone hates the English’ comment of Scotland prop Simon Berghan.
“If you’re in a position of responsibility you’ve got to be careful what you say because if you talk about hate and you talk about rubbing people’s noses in the dirt, and all those sorts of things, it incites certain behaviours, and are they the sorts of behaviours we want to see?” said Jones, above.
“I’m a human being. I don’t consider myself any different from anyone else. For me to travel on public transport I thought was okay. But I’ll make sure I won’t in future. It’s as simple as that. I can’t because it was shown on Sunday what happens when I do. It wasn’t comfortable.
“I never knock back a request for a selfie unless I’m racing somewhere. So I try and do the right thing by the fans but, if that happens, you’ve got to have a look at your own safety. That’s the world we live in. As an Australian coaching England, there were always going to be challenges and that’s just one of them.” When pressed on whether the abuse had been verbal or physical, Jones replied: “A bit of both.” No complaint was made to police.
It was a sour end to a bad weekend for Jones, who was on his way to watch Manchester United play Chelsea in the company of another great Scot, Sir Alex Ferguson. He was able to help Jones rake over the coals of the shock loss.
“He mentioned a lot of matches where things went wrong and a lot of the times you don’t have a solution to it and that’s the reality,” said Jones. “We all think we’re clever but we’re not so clever because our game’s an inexact science. We don’t have robots, we have human beings and on the day things can happen to people and we don’t know why.” Back in camp in Oxford yesterday, Jones insisted there would be no wholesale changes, nor a redrawing of the power-based tactical template which has taken England to No2 in the world.
“The question is whether I’m going to go away from the type of rugby we’re playing and the answer is no,” he said. “We don’t have the athletic ability to do it.
“I’m not a magician, mate. I have them for 13 weeks a year. I can’t suddenly make them more athletic. All I can do is work with them as well as we can and try to maximise the rugby out of the players we have.”
He did acknowledge England had to be smarter against France.
“We got caught at the breakdown area,” he said. “We play a little differently to what the players are used to playing. We don’t play a formation or a pattern. It involves more decision-making for them.
“That means it is more difficult to do. Sometimes we are not as attentive to the decision-making as we need to be.
“The problems we’ve got, I know we’ve got, and sometimes you can’t fix them straight away, but there’s no lack of attitude.”