Eddie is ready to blaze a trail for England MASKED MARVEL
COACH MOVES TO STEP UP DATA USE
WHAT does an England head coach do when he does not have England to coach? He coaches a Championship team.
Last night Eddie Jones and his England assistants were putting Ealing Trailfinders through their paces. While England’s players have been negotiating the demands of post- lockdown fixture congestion in the Premiership, the coaching unit have been twiddling their thumbs.
When England next play at the end of October it will have been seven months since their last game. So the diversion to west London and English rugby’s second tier represented an attempt to keep their hand in.
“You’ve got to coach so we’ve been using these games to do some in- game coaching and then we’ve been doing some on- field coaching with Ealing. Hopefully, we’ll find other opportunities as things open up a little bit,” said Jones, right.
“We’ve got a good six to eight weeks to give the players the best coaching environment they need. Ealing is an opportunity to do that. We need to improve our level of coaching and we need to get better.”
To keep on top of his selection, Jones is exploring a new avenue. Data. “There are three sources of data for selection,” said Jones, speaking on behalf of Umbro, England’s new official technical kit partner. “There are live games, there is the video of games and then there is the metrics that are collected around performance. Now to me that’s one of the things that’s missing.
“Take Mako Vunipola, who is probably one of the best loose- heads in the world. He carries the ball 15 times a game.
“His longest carry is probably three seconds. So he has got the ball in his hand for 45 seconds.
“For 79 minutes and
15 seconds he is working off the ball – and we don’t really have any metrics to measure
the effectiveness of his movement off the ball. We have some very crass collection of data on that but what we are looking at is to collect data that is meaningful in terms of giving feedback on more effective movement off the ball. “Football are way ahead of us. We’ve spoken to a number of people from Red Bull who have obviously set up quite an efficient football factory at the moment.”
Since the restart, Jones has been impressed with Bath’s Tom de Glanville and Exeter’s Josh Hodge, who he has already included at senior level as an apprentice, but he is unlikely to be gambling the best win ratio of any England coach by picking them this autumn. “The last experiment I did was about 39 years ago in biology,” said Jones.
EDDIE JONES is an Umbro ambassador. Umbro will be launching its new England rugby kit on September 7. For more visit: www. umbro. co. uk/ rugby