Touch of Mourinho in coach’s drive for substance over style

Jones is transforming his charges from the soft touches of 2015 into hard-nosed winners

Along with his managerial talent, Eddie Jones has a gift for talking, which can be a nuisance for him. Even when he would rather say little, he ends up saying plenty because he enjoys planting messages – often with humour, and always with his fundamental beliefs visible through the flow of pre-match oratory.

Jones arrived to speak to us about the Scotland game at Murrayfield with many seasoned England watchers predicting a “say nothing” media day. The first question-and-answer seemed to bear that out.

Jones would be disappointed, would he not, if England did not defend on the edge of the laws in Edinburgh? Jones considered this reference to Gregor Townsend questioning the legality of English defensive play, stiffened in his chair and said: “You’d have to ask Gregor. If he wants to talk about the referee, let him talk about that – I’m concentrating on the game. We’ve got a good referee and he’ll referee the game. If you want to talk about those side issues and be involved in the sideshow, go and talk to Gregor, I’m sure he’ll chat.”

A faint frost spread across the room. Oh dear, maybe the camp were on verbal lockdown. But after an unpromising start, the inquisition ended up as a mass stroll down memory lane, to Jones’s debut as England coach in this fixture two years ago, his boyhood love of West Ham, and other landmarks he has passed while on the Rugby Football Union’s payroll.

In a sense he loves the thing he hates. Like other elite coaches, in other sports, he is resistant to what Roy Hodgson liked to call “the mass media” because it exists outside his control. Most great managers and coaches lean towards control freakery. Even “empowering” players to make decisions is a form of supervision, because it creates a debt to the boss for bestowing that freedom, along with a burden of responsibility.

This England squad are under such heavy surveillance that Jones says only their bedrooms are out of bounds (“And we might not want to see what they do in their rooms anyway.”) His captain, Dylan Hartley, is a classic mirror image of a coach – a sergeant major who is expected by his superior officer to check the players are stretching properly and turning up on time as part of his “full-time job” at the head of the team.

Over the past two years Jones has honed in on the very core of his task, to change England from a talent-rich but at times unfocused lot into a pack of yard dogs who coldly refuse to lose. The “soft” England who blew it in the group stage of the 2015 World Cup were to be transformed into ruthless bastards who could find their way out of any kind of trouble.

Coaching England appeals to Jones’s preference for mentally “tough” rugby players over those who flare and fade in games. As he references football so often, there is no need to apologise for comparing him to Jose Mourinho, in the sense that both dislike talk of “systems” and “styles of play”.

Jones told us at England’s base in Surrey: “What we want to know about ourselves is that we can tough it out in any situation. Don’t ask me about style because style is irrelevant. Style is Ralph Lauren, or whatever brand you want it to be. Hugo Boss, Mont Blanc – they come in and out. But resilience and toughness stay and that is what we are trying to develop.” Even his West Ham memories point this way. He liked Trevor Brooking – the team’s “artist” – but was drawn more to another famous Hammer. “I loved Billy Bonds for some reason, maybe because he was that big tough defender,” he said.

The build-up to the Wales game was peppered with provocations. But Jones appears less eager to wind up Scotland, which could be bad news for Townsend’s men. England’s coach is probably hoping the Scots read his summary of where England are now: “They’ve learnt how to play winning rugby. They’ve learnt to develop a mindset to find a way to win Test rugby. Test match rugby is about winning, it’s not about entertainment. If you want entertainment, watch Super Rugby. They like winning, they want to get better at it and they work together so much more cohesively now.”

Sometimes a good “mind game” is telling the opposition how mentally strong you are.