02 EDDIE JONES
ENGLAND COACH
UP 16
The day before the Test against the Boks at the World Cup, Eddie said it was the worst captain’s run he’d ever witnessed. I don’t know whether he was trying to put the team on edge, but it worked!
That’s the thing about Eddie: he knows how to get the best out of players and uses different techniques with different players. It’s a good skill to have.
When Eddie came into coach Japan, we knew how to lose before we knew how to win. With Eddie, we learnt why we lost and how we lost. Once we’d done that we knew how to start winning. It was a four-year process and by the time we got to the World Cup the players had taken ownership of the team and it showed with some of the crucial decisions we made. Eddie empowered us to do that and he put pride back into the Japan jersey.
He’s very knowledgeable about the game, and very competitive too! Another of Eddie’s strengths is that he gets the right people in to help him and to help the team.
He never does anything half-arsed; it’s always 100%. One thing I noticed was that he was always the first one I’d see in the morning. The team would come into the gym at 5am and he’d been there since 4am. We would all think, ‘When does this guy sleep?’ With the amount of work he puts in, he has to be the world’s hardest-working coach.
I’m not surprised at all by how well Eddie’s done with England – I knew it would happen! I never used to be a fan of watching England but since Eddie took over, with Steve Borthwick in the mix too, I find it interesting to see how their style is changing.
England are becoming the dominant force in world rugby and come the 2019 World Cup they will be the team to beat. That’s down to Eddie.