Prickly coach still draws energy from a vaudeville volatility

Eddie Jones needed a cleansing holiday in Okinawa, not to mention thrice-daily crossfit sessions, before he could begin to salve the agony of England’s World Cup final defeat. This powerful, decisive performance, disabusing Ireland of any Triple Crown ideas, surely advanced his grieving process.

And yet a few glimpses of scar tissue remained: the staccato, wise-guy replies to innocuous questions, the bristling at any second-guessing of his judgment. True, this return to Twickenham offered a reminder of his side’s brute force. But to judge by the prickly head coach, the joy was still missing.

“You’re all clever, so I’ve just got to suck it all up, enjoy what you say and try to learn from you,” he crowed, when asked if beating Ireland brought any sense of vindication. As for the decision to select five locks? “Maybe I’ll pick six next week.”

It is easy to brush all this off as harmless repartee. After all, Jones has elevated mischief to a theatrical art form. Increasingly, though, his jousting betrays a deep suspicion of those who dare to doubt him.

His relations with the media, barely four months after he was lauded for his brilliance in taking down the All Blacks, have become not so much frosty as Siberian. He recently treated a sensible query about meditation techniques by shrugging, “You must be thinking about someone else – maybe another half-asian person,” a crass lapse for which he later apologised.

Any attempt to explore his strategic thinking elicits an acerbic put-down. Even the off-the-record drinks with journalists, once a feature of England’s Algarve training camps, have dried up.

This alone is hardly a cause for public sympathy. But Jones’s alienation from the fourth estate does reveal much about the with-us-or-against-us mentality he has fostered around this England squad and, for this Ireland game, he had his players parroting some familiar mantras.

“The goal is to be the best team in the world,” man-of-the-match Courtney Lawes said yesterday, in an echo of England’s World Cup rhetoric until they ran into a South African juggernaut. “The best team the world has ever seen.”

Jones has long drained those working for him with his drillsergeant demands. An unofficial biography contained an anecdote from Ben Perkins, Jones’s former kicking coach with the Wallabies, which today sounds eerily prescient: “A coach has to pick who he can be hard on and who he has to handle more carefully. Sometimes Eddie didn’t always get it right. He can be brutal.” That much was evident when Lawes arrived for this match with a black eye, as Lewis Ludlam did in Paris. One imagines that a session with Navy Seals on Coronado Beach is a breeze next to the average England hit-up at Pennyhill Park.

After Jones suffered a stroke in 2013 while Japan coach, he said that the experience made him less intense, more inclined to relax. His England players must regard those remarks with the wriest of grins. If anything, his four-and-a-half year tenure at Twickenham – the longest period he has spent coaching any team – has made him more wired than ever. He is the only coach to lose two World

Cup finals and appears hell-bent on erasing that scar.

Jones put his faith again in Manu Tuilagi against Ireland and, sure enough, his outside centre barrelled through their defence like a baby rhino. He trusted in Lawes to inflict damage up front. And,

Running riot: Luke Cowan-dickie goes over for England’s third try in a twist that would have delighted him more than any, he watched replacement loosehead Ellis Genge liven up the scrum with plenty of brawn and backchat.

Jones had already described the scrum as the place for the dark arts, for bending the rules to breaking point. In Genge, he has found a player who champions those principles. The two share striking similarities. Both come from hard-bitten communities: Jones from the rough end of Sydney’s southern beaches, Genge from a deprived suburb of Bristol.

Rugby snobbery is anathema to both. Just as Jones, a half-japanese outsider in the cloistered, largely Anglo-celtic world of privateschool Australian rugby in the Seventies, had to fight against ingrained privilege, so Genge has broken down the rules on access to the sport’s elite. Theirs is an alliance that could yet go far.

Trouble is, nobody, perhaps not even Jones himself, knows how long he will last at the England helm. His contract says 2021, while common sense says he will find his World Cup itch impossible to scratch and sign an extension to France 2023. Much depends on whether England’s outmuscling of Ireland was a one-off, or indicative of a longer-term renaissance. Jones will be content to keep his detractors guessing, given how much energy he draws from volatility. One of his great missions, as he admitted in a BBC interview, is to honour a “responsibility to create the theatre of the game – sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t”.

This time, there can be no dispute that his strange brand of vaudeville paid off. But it would be to everyone’s relief if he could work from a happier

script.