Forget World Cup – Jones just needs a victory
Head coach simply cannot afford England’s slump to continue when South Africa visit today
Eddie Jones has checked every inch of the World Cup schedule, shooting about on bullet trains to see stadiums, hotels and training grounds. A ghost train could be the conveyance in Japan unless he can restore England’s winning ways.
Many of rugby’s most senior figures consider it “unthinkable” that Jones would lose the England job before next year’s Japan World Cup. Yet these Quilter internationals and next year’s Six Nations Championship are an acid test of the England head coach’s ability to revive a side who have lost six of their past seven games (if you include the Barbarians fixture) – and five of their past six. The 18 straight wins from February 2016 to March 2017 are a misty memory as Jones confronts South Africa shorn of “400 caps” through injury.
Twickenham is twitchy and Jones is said to acknowledge that his coaching has never faced such a trial after an exodus of backroom staff, the usual autumn rot of injuries and a year of mutterings about his confrontational style, which, his critics say, bears the hallmark of a classic two-year regime rather than the four-year plotter the Rugby Football Union hired him to be. South Africa, New Zealand, Japan and Australia are lining up to reinforce the suspicion that England have lost their way.
“He, like Sir Clive [Woodward], has said, ‘This is all about the World Cup, judge me on the World Cup,’” says Dick Best, the former England coach. “And he will be judged on it. He thinks we’re on course for it. But we need everybody fit. Some of these guys coming in are good club players, but we shall see whether they’re internationals or not.”
Chapter 18 of a new biography of Jones called Rugby Maverick by Mike Colman is headed: “Unsteady Eddie.” He is certainly that, though some of his problems are historic or cultural. English rugby’s attrition rate continues to make a mockery of preparations for the autumn internationals, and one of the country’s deepest flaws remains resistant to cure. The first big crack in 2018 appeared at Murrayfield when England failed to adapt to Scotland’s dynamic game plan and were beaten 23-15. Regimented on-field thinking was identified early by Jones as a problem in English rugby, but a solution has eluded him.
Another senior figure in previous England regimes identifies how hard it is for Jones to teach players to think on their feet “when they come from a background where they’re not allowed to”. He speaks of clubs handing out rigid game plans, which the players “are expected to stick to” and leave them ill equipped to “make decisions in the heat of battle”, while also hindering creativity.
But Jones has a plethora of more short-term issues to deal with. By consent, winning two and losing two of these four autumn games would be acceptable, provided England are competitive in all four. But a 1-3 series result (with a sole victory against world No11 Japan) would revive doubts about whether these England players have disengaged from Jones’s intense style of management.
“I think there will be a natural drifting away,” Best says. “Many of them will have heard it before. We’re into the third year now of his tenancy – so he’s got to keep coming up with new stuff, hasn’t he? In fairness, I love it when I hear through the grapevine what he says to guys. It’s a 30-second phone call. ‘You’re on the bench Saturday, but you’re still too fat. See you. Bye.’
“Players are more powerful these days – but is a delegation going to go to Steve Brown [the RFU chief executive] about him and say, ‘He’s too rude,’ or ‘He’s too Australian?’ No. Initially, when he [Jones] came here, he wasn’t here to make friends. He was here to make us successful. And he did that.”
David Flatman, an England prop in the Woodward era and now one of rugby’s best pundits, says: “Anecdotally, we hear that Eddie works the boys very hard indeed. History – Japan, etc – tells us that his approach is unlikely to change, unless it has to.”
On match day, naturally, philosophical debating points are moved aside in favour of questions about England’s inexperienced back row (10 caps between them), callow props, the dropping of Mike Brown and the midfield combination, where Ben Te’o is picked at 12 after 28 minutes of club action.
Flatman says: “The primary issue is one of repeated forward momentum without Billy Vunipola in the side. So far, they haven’t managed it on a consistent basis. If Billy is fit, then some dominant collisions are guaranteed and Ben Youngs can sleep soundly, dreaming of the quick ball coming his way.
“No Billy means that some finesse and creativity needs to be sacrificed for outright grunt in the midfield in order to get England moving forward on to the ball.
“I think this pack can survive against South Africa. It’s all about not being too alpha [male] with ball in hand. Use footwork with the ball, focus like hunting savages on the clear-out work when following it
in. Work-rate can overcome brute force, but it must be sustained and disciplined. If this turns into a carpet-carrying exercise, the Boks will likely rule.”
In his book, Colman recalls one of Jones’s early mission statements with England: “If there is a problem in the field they solve the problem. That’s what you want, a self-organising, self-reliant team that makes decisions, by themselves. One that just gets on with the job.”
But if Jones thought being a martinet would drive England in that direction (he employs sports science and subtler forms of psychology, too), results this year have left him at the mercy of a force no coach can control: public opinion, which weighs heavily on administrators. The reconnaissance in Japan is done. But the results need a lot more work.