We called Eddie ‘The Devil’ but his brutal regime made us legends

THERE WAS a month to go until the 2015 Rugby World Cup and in the Land of the Rising Sun, the sun had yet to rise. Blearyeyed, Japan’s players were traipsing off to training. Waiting for them in a Miyazaki gym was the man they called ‘The Devil’.

No matter that he had suffered a stroke two years earlier, Eddie Jones was on hand to oversee every minute of a working day that would end for him and the players when the sun had long since set.

“He was always the first one I would see in the morning,” said Michael Leitch, the Japan captain. “The team would come into the gym at 5am and he had been there since 4am. We would all think, ‘When does this guy sleep?’”

During that merciless preparation period, Jones was on a mission and woe betide anyone who was not on it with him. Rugby training had been basically a once-a-day activity, maybe twice occasionally in preseason. Jones had Japan training three times – at 5am, 10am and 3pm. Every day. For five weeks.

“I played 19 years of professional football and that was the toughest training of my life. We were pushed to the limit,” said squad member Craig Wing in Mike Colman’s new book ‘Eddie Jones, Rugby Maverick’.

At the end of that gruelling camp, the squad departed for the World Cup from Haneda Airport in Tokyo, bound for England. There were no fans or media to see the squad off but Jones insisted the players boarded the flight in their suits. Wing asked Jones why. “When we leave here we’re going out in our suits with our heads held high because when we come back we will have changed history,” replied Jones.

And they did. After beating the Springboks in what was the biggest shock in World Cup history, they were greeted like rock stars on their return.

When Jones took the Brave Blossoms job in April 2012 after three seasons with Japanese club side Suntory, he had encountered a culture of meek acceptance that he pledged to change. When the side lost at home to the French Barbarians that November Japan’s captain at the time, Toshiaki Hirose, made the mistake of laughing nervously at the after-match press conference.

“It’s not funny, it’s not funny,” yelled Jones before publicly eviscerating his captain and his team for their defeatism in an incendiary press conference that remains a YouTube classic of its genre.

“The surprising thing was at the end of it the chairman came up to me and said it was about time someone said that,” said Jones, in a Sky Sports programme ‘Eddie Jones: Rugby, Japan and Me’ to be aired ahead of today’s England-Japan match.

“I think everyone realised Japan were one of those teams where they get beaten 50-20, at the end of the game everyone would clap and the players would be happy with that. We had to change that.” He went to extraordinary lengths to try to develop independent thinkers in a culture that naturally gravitated towards the collective. Coaches would be ordered not to show up to meetings and training sessions and the players were secretly filmed to see who would emerge as leaders.

Players were routinely lambasted in front of teammates. Jones is half-Japanese but he had never set foot in the country until he was 31 so he needed a translator to ram the message home. Hidenori Sato was appointed.

“Just once I tried to tweak something he said to a player to make it less harsh but Eddie understood enough Japanese to pick that up and I never did it again, that’s for sure,” said Sato. “Towards the end, some of the players started to dislike me because his words were coming out of my mouth.”

Ultimately, the tough love worked.

The story of Japan’s shock victory over South Africa is being made into a film in the new year, working title ‘The Brighton Miracle’. Jones, who will be played in the film by Temuera Morrison – bounty hunter Jango Fett in Star Wars – says the ends justified the means.

“If you do what everyone else does, you’re not going to win,” said Jones. “We achieved something that no team has ever achieved before and to do that you have to push the limits.”

There are only four survivors of that famous day in today’s Japan squad at Twickenham and each one will have their own lightand-shade memories of their former coach. Ultimately though, they are thankful to Eddie-San.

“He trained us hard,” said wing Akihito Yamada. “But he changed our mentality.”