‘Now we have to go and make it 3-0’
The England coach, Eddie Jones, has challenged his team to complete a clean sweep in Australia after they created history by becoming the first English team to beat the Wallabies in a series away from home. The 23-7 victory also saw them leapfrog Australia into second place in the world rankings, their highest placing since 2004, but Jones dismissed that milestone, urging his side to set their sights on emulating world champions New Zealand.
“We want to be the best team in the world and we want to win the series 3-0,” said Jones, still unbeaten after eight matches in charge. “If the All Blacks were in this situation now, what would they be thinking? They’d be thinking 3-0. If we want to be the best team in the world, we have to think 3-0. Being second in the rankings doesn’t feel good because we want to be first.”
That message was already being circulated among the England players on the field just before the final whistle, the belief that they should not be content with taking the series but round off in style in Sydney next Saturday.
The win was built around a titanic defensive effort, with England making 169 tackles to Australia’s 49. Six English players made 15 tackles or more, with James Haskell topping the charts on 21, although it was his back-row partner, Chris Robshaw, on the occasion of his 50th cap, who was a widely-acclaimed winner of the man-of-the-match award. Jones likened England’s resilience to the strategy employed by Muhammad Ali in his fight with George Foreman.
“We had to play rope-a-dope,” said Jones of his team’s ability to take enormous punishment before hitting back with a late try from Owen Farrell. “That was the sort of game we had to play. We had to be tactically flexible and that’s why I’m so pleased for the team. We got an opportunity to score a try and took it. That’s the sign of a good side. Australia will come back because they’re a wellcoached, driven team, so we’re anticipating a feisty encounter in Sydney.”
Jones believes that the historic victory and the upturn in English fortunes will inspire a generation of kids to take up the game, one of the stated aims of Rugby World Cup 2015.
“To win a series like this is a win for English rugby in total – for the RFU, the supporters,” said Jones. “We’re all in this together. Young kids will be sitting at home and, rather than wanting to be Dele Alli or Harry Kane, they might want to be Owen Farrell or George Ford.”
One of the ways in which England steeled themselves beforehand was to listen to a poem – The Guy in The Glass, by Dale Wimbrow – read to them by defence coach, Paul Gustard. It became the theme for the week, with echoes of the Nelson Mandela-inspired ‘Invictus’ motif adopted by the World Cup-winning Springboks in 1995.
“I told the players that I’d had lots of opportunities in life, off the field, on the field, and I wasted most of them,” recounted Gustard, who was hired by Jones from Saracens. “During my career I would look at other people for the blame, I thought I trained and worked hard, but I didn’t. I told them that this was their opportunity to make history, to do something different, to be special, and if they were to look at themselves at the end of the day, could they say that they had emptied themselves? I think today they did.”
The Wallaby coach, Michael Cheika, said that his team will have “to suck it up and use the scars of defeat”.