Staff exodus suggests Jones drives England set-up too hard
Turnover of key personnel points to troubled times for the head coach as the World Cup in Japan looms
Working for Eddie Jones has seldom been dressed up as a sedate enterprise. Even his rough-hewn former team-mates at Randwick, on Sydney’s southern beaches, talk of the extremes of which he is capable. Phil Kearns, a former Wallabies captain, warned this year: “He is a very astute coach, but there is a point where the fanatical work ethic goes too far.”
So deep do his obsessions run that the great Mark Ella, another long-time friend, had to chide him during a catch-up over coffee for rearranging the sugar cachets to illustrate a game-plan. “Mate,” Ella despaired, “can you stop talking about rugby for one second?”
Jones, during his time with England, has claimed never to take his work home with him. And it is true that he has been successful at keeping his personal life with wife Hiroko and daughter Chelsea, fenced off. But he is hardly your typical nine-tofive merchant. While steering Australia to the final of the 2003 World Cup, his demands were so incessant, one member of his staff decided to test him by sending a fax at 2am. The response arrived in an instant.
So, England could hardly say they were not warned. Jones arrived at Twickenham not as some deft master of consensus, but as an acid-tongued bruiser whose perfectionism has been matched only by his capacity for burning people out.
The rate of England staff turnover over the past nine months has marked the