Jones is just angry at being out-coached

WERE Italy’s tactics good for the game or bad? What’s without doubt is that, for this specific game, they were good. They were intended to put England off their game and they worked spectacularly, as Eddie Jones’ men didn’t have a clue what to do to counteract things in the first half. Italy had to do something innovative because they had shipped 96 points in the first two games. They couldn’t do what they had done before and expect a different outcome. What they could not imagine was how long it would be effective. As soon as England saw what they were doing, they should have manufactured a time-out to work out how to stop things. They needed to pick and go through the tackle, offload in the tackle, keep the ball off the ground to make it a maul or grab an Italian player and change the tackle into a ruck. Plenty of options but none were used or, it would appear, discussed on the pitch or off it. It was good coaching designed to ask questions of the second best team in the world, with all the resources at their disposal on the pitch and in the stands, and for the first 40 minutes they did not have the answers. Italy out-coached England for the first half and that’s what Eddie Jones is really annoyed about, not what it did or did not do for the game of rugby as a whole.