England stand on the precipice, with greatness in reach
Their coach has tasted the joy and despair of World Cup finals, which makes him ideal to lead the team, writes Paul Hayward, Sports Writer of the Year, in Tokyo
On the World Cup winners’ medal is a torii gate that symbolises the transition from the mundane to the sacred. England will try to pass through that opening in a tournament their head coach, Eddie Jones, wishes could go on forever. “The only sadness is the tournament is going to end,” Jones says. “I always find if you’ve had a good World Cup, you don’t want it to end, you want to keep it going, but like everything there is a final chapter and the final chapter is on Saturday.”
Jones has won a World Cup final but lost one, too. In 2003 he was in charge of the Australia side beaten by England. Four years later he was a consultant to the South Africa team who defeated England in Paris. Tomorrow, he leads another squad of men to that precipice between immortality and regret, between fulfilment and remorse. Not many of us will peer across that divide; not in international sport, at the level of global spectacle, with millions of pairs of eyes watching and judging.
When the journey is good, an alternative reality takes over: the camaraderie, the narrative, the joy of winning and seeing hard work validated. These England players have travelled that smooth road, through a moment of wonder, with the sensational defeat of the All Blacks last weekend. But it can still go either way. In a sense, Jones is pining for the unity and happiness to go on forever. He knows the joy of winning finals and he knows the devastation of losing.
He talks of the pain of losing to Sir Clive Woodward’s team 16 years ago: “I didn’t realise what an effect it had on me until possibly 2007. You think everything is all right, but you lose a World Cup final and it’s a difficult experience. I’ve experienced both and I know the difference you feel and if you don’t reflect really well, then you carry some things with you that aren’t always positive. They can be negative and they have an effect on how you approach your job.”
What things? “I was just too desperate to win and you can’t be desperate for things. You’ve got to have the will to prepare to win, that’s the difference, and it takes time sometimes. After you lose a World Cup you want it to happen like that, because you want to get rid of that memory and it doesn’t happen like that. You’ve got to work again and build it up. Sometimes you’re not as patient building it up.
The same for the team. “Yeah I think it happens with players as well. If you’ve experienced a significant trauma in your sporting life, it takes times to get over it.”
Yet this is where England are cashing in on their appointment of Jones, with his perfect balance of experience and his determination from day one in the job to fix his gaze on one date: Nov 2. When Jones kept saying he was focusing on the World Cup final from four years out, some rugby purists chafed. What about the Six Nations? How about these autumn internationals? But here he is, in his 50th game as England coach, sleeping “three to four hours a night” and trying to manage a hugely complicated organism as it prepares for its final test against a South Africa side of whom he says: “They’ve got a history of being the most physically intimidating team in the world, so we’ve got to take that away from them.”
Jones still has Bryan Habana’s winning blazer from 2007. The great Springbok winger sent it to him because Jones was not eligible for one. He still has it: “Somewhere. I might wear it on Saturday, hey. How do you reckon I’ll look with a red tie and a green blazer? I imagine I wouldn’t have put on that much weight.”
A ruthless coach, Jones has also shown an emotional streak out here, welling up when he spoke of his pride at managing England and at the death of his friend and mentor at Randwick, Jeff Sayle. There was also a gleam of moisture in his eyes when he was asked about honouring his parents by reaching another final. He was particularly tense before the quarter-final against Australia.
One newspaper said there would be “blood on the walls of Twickenham” if England went out so early. As he announced his team for the final he said: “Three weeks ago we were hopeless, I was going to get the sack, Owen [Farrell] couldn’t kick a goal.”
What a difference back-to-back wins over Australia and New Zealand make. “Our whole mindset is about taking the game to South Africa, playing without fear,” he said.
The messaging is all carefully managed, from the 15-minute coffee morning he arranged for his players with the media in the no-man’s land of a Hilton hotel conference room to the lifting of pressure from his team. “We’ll have a chat at the hotel before we leave, but all the work’s done, guys,” Jones said. “I think I said when I first took over the job – my job’s to become redundant. And I’m almost redundant now. The team’s running the team, which is how it should be.”
The four-year “visualisation” approaches its reckoning. He told us: “I think you always work back from your goal. What’s your goal? Where do you want to go. How are you going to get there. I don’t have great visualisation powers. But I know where we want to go and I know how we have to do it. So we just need to go ahead and do it now.”
With his 80-per-cent win ratio, Jones is the most successful of England’s coaches – a fact proclaimed on the team announcement press release. Remarkably, this is England’s fourth World Cup final in nine stagings – but they have won only once. For this one Jones says they are promised “16 degrees, beautiful weather conditions for rugby,” for a team with an average age of 27 years and 60 days – the youngest for a World Cup final in the professional era. Their youth is offset by a healthy caps average of 51 – third on the list of World Cup finalists. This England team have grown up fast.
Jones, meanwhile, is the first foreign coach to lead a team to a World Cup final, in a year when another Australian, Trevor Bayliss, oversaw England’s cricket World Cup win. In the absence of English coaches who are either a) good enough or b) given the chance, the fusing of Australian temperament and English talent has been a winning formula. So far.
Manu Tuilagi, whose injury-ravaged career has been reborn, talks of “a special moment, and something that’s going to be with us for the rest of our lives”. He might have added – for better or for worse (the odds and the form say – “better”.)
In Asia’s first World Cup, which Jones wants to go on forever, there is one more hill to climb. The big one. The one you can see from Tokyo’s highest buildings and which the authorities tell you is a “serious mountain” and not to be trifled with. It, too, features on the World Cup final medals. There is only Mount Fuji now to ascend.