Jones targets new approach to cope with absence of Vunipola duo
● Injured brothers ‘special’, says coach ● Eight uncapped players in squad
Eddie Jones has admitted the injured Vunipola brothers are irreplaceable and their absence would force England to find a new style as the head coach named a squad for next month’s autumn internationals, with No 8 Ben Morgan recalled after three years without a cap and stand-off Danny Cipriani again left on the outside, looking in.
Jones included eight uncapped players in an injury and suspension-hit party of 36 who will train in Portugal from next Wednesday and return just two days before opening their four-match series against South Africa on 3 November.
“You don’t replace those two – they’re special players,” Jones said of Mako Vunipola, who is out for six weeks with a torn calf muscle, and his brother Billy, the No 8 who will not play again until January due to a broken arm.
“To get a defensive line going backwards you either need to batter it, which the Vunipolas can do with skill, or you need to move it around, or you need to go over the top.
“We need to find different ways of doing it.”
England have lost five of their last six Test matches, and while Jones insisted the only results that matter are the ones at the 2019 World Cup, he conceded he would lose his job if his team failed to win any of the autumn fixtures, with the Springboks followed into Twickenham by world champions New Zealand, minnows Japan and old rivals Australia.
England will be led by cocaptains through a series for the first time, as Jones bracketed hooker Dylan Hartley with stand-off/inside centre Owen Farrell.
Saracens’ South Africanborn flanker Mike Rhodes was among the rookies selected, having newly qualified on three years’ residency with the prospect of a debut against his compatriots.
Rhodes, 30, was backed to “play for keeps” by Jones. “He’s a tough guy,” the coach said. “When he hits, he hurts.”
Cipriani’s omission as England’s “third choice” standoff behind George Ford and Farrell drew was compared by Jones to an awkward converastion with a girlfriend, but he struck a more hard-line note when discussing why the player had been restored to the England fold on the summer tour of South Africa but now omitted – with a much talkedabout court case in Jersey and an award as the Premiership’s player of the month in between.
Jones said: “So people think he played well – well, maybe I don’t think he plays that well. And at the moment my judge-
0 Eddie Jones is ready for the challenge of leading an injury-hit England into the autumn Tests.
EDDIE JONES
ment is the most important judgement.”
Overall, England have lost 324 caps’ worth of unavailable front-line players, including the recent Test retiree, loosehead prop Joe Marler, and the injured Harlequins flanker Chris Robshaw, Wasps lock Joe Launchbury and Bath backs Anthony Watson and Jonathan Joseph.
While Jones described this shortfall as a third of the 900 caps a World Cup-winning
squad needs, he resisted recalling the 85-Test tighthead prop Dan Cole, or retaining Cipriani, but did include the uncapped wings Joe Cokanasiga and Nathan Earle alongside Manu Tuilagi, Ben Te’o and the previously out-of-favour and then exiled Chris Ashton in an eclectic and potentially exciting set of backs.
It is in the forwards where a nailed-on pick such as Maro Itoje mingles with a vast battalion of new or newly-new faces, plus the nigh-on forgotten Morgan of Gloucester, who won the last of his 31 caps under Jones’s predecessor, Stuart Lancaster, in 2015.
Jones said his lesson from coaching at three World Cups – in charge of Australia and Japan in 2003 and 2015 respectively, and as a consultant to the winners South Africa in 2007 – is that results beforehand are almost irrelevant.
He related how Jake White, the Springboks’ victorious head coach in 2007, was summoned home from England mid-tour in 2006 to discuss a motion of no confidence among the SA Rugby board, and needed support from sponsors including the influential billionaire, Johann Rupert, to keep his job.
Even after that, White’s team lost three of their four Trinations matches in summer 2007 before carrying off the World Cup.
“If we don’t win any [of the autumn matches], I’m probably not going to be here, so we need to win a few,” Jones conceded.
“What’s important is you keep moving forward and sometimes the scoreboard doesn’t tell you you’re moving forward.
“We’ve got a team to win the World Cup. We need our best players available and we need them fit – and we need them united and I think we’ve got the right leadership team to do that.”
“If we don’t win any of the autumn matches I’m probably not going tobeheresoweneed towinafew”