Jones will not rest until his players achieve perfection
Head coach has put England on path to greatness but that will not stop him demanding more
This winning run actually started with the desolation of last year’s World Cup: the hollow consolation prize of a 60-3 victory over Uruguay in Manchester that brought the shroud down on Stuart Lancaster’s reign. But victories two-to-11 belong very much to Eddie Jones, who admitted after this 37-21 win that he inherited “oodles and oodles of talent”. Jones is now so at home as England coach that he is even picking up posh phrases. “Oodles and oodles” sounded very Twickenham. But Jones remains a revolutionary. He has disregarded every previous template for managing the richest nation in world rugby and achieved spectacular results in his first 12 months. A Six Nations Grand Slam, a 3-0 series drubbing of Australia – in Australia – and now a first win over South Africa in 12 Tests and 10 years.
Unavoidably now people will expect England to win all four games in this Autumn series, with Fiji, Argentina and Australia next up. No longer the heartbroken hosts of a World Cup that ended up mocking them, England have set their own bar high. Expectation is growing that Jones is leading England towards some kind of showdown with New Zealand. Jones would hate this kind of talk. It is precisely the sort or presumptuous chest-beating he tries to discourage with his forensically critical summaries of even the most satisfying victories.
“We’d like to have a clean sheet but we didn’t, so we’ve got work to do,” is an example, delivered here. But surely he must be thrilled with his first year’s work? “I’ll be more pleased when we play better against Fiji next week. We can’t wait to play Fiji next week,” he said. “There’s always been depth in England rugby, but I think it’s about the players having more ambition.” Anyone would think some previous England sides had an ego problem – a tendency to see their names in lights before they had properly lodged them in the history books. Jones has erased this tendency.
In a more generous moment, he mentioned England’s three nominations for world player of the year (Maro Itoje, Billy Vunipola and Owen Farrell), and said Ben Youngs could become “one of the best halfbacks in the world.” In fact he sprayed quite a lot of praise around, but always with the caveat that this side are currently “not good enough” to be seen as world beaters, which he intends them to be. Before the game, Dylan Hartley said England have “a goal under Eddie Jones to be the best in the world.” Caution is advisable. But excitement is permissible. Any England team that wins 10 serious games in a row, beating Europe’s best and two southern hemisphere nations along the way, is clearly going places, and not just because the players can now earn a reported £22,000 per Test. The upswing was started not by a round of pay talks but the expert coaching and psychological management of Jones.
By any measure he inherited a bounty of players: a depth so great that they coped here without Itoje, George Kruis, Antony Watson, James Haskell and Jack Nowell. Coped, too, with their jittery, error-laden start, which was forgivable on an international seasonal debut. No matter how long a club campaign has been running, the first gathering of an international side almost invariably features small misunderstandings and imprecisions.
Players are switching to a different playing style, different colleagues, and certainly another kind of opposition. Not Saracens or Gloucester, now, or even Toulon, but the bruisers-in-chief of the Southern Hemisphere – a country where rugby, to repeat Jones’ pre-match dig, resembles “chess on steroids.” The Springboks are in the grip of one of their periodic identity crises, but they were battle-hardened coming here. Hemorrhaging 98 points in two meetings with New Zealand was a sure sign that something big was wrong.
Physical threat, or at least meatstacking, is their fall-back. Only one of their forwards came in at less than 18st. There are probably still days when sheer size can still win you a game at this level. Yet there was something quaint about the idea that England could be bulldozed on their own pitch by a pack so short of skill.
If throwing in the biggest blokes they can find is South Africa’s route to salvation, they had better be ready for a long voyage. Trying to crush England in the scrum gave them considerable pleasure. They whooped and punched the air whenever the English front-row buckled. But it added up to not very much. After a messy start (six penalties conceded in 20 minutes), redeemed only by Jonny May’s arrow of a try in the Springboks’ right-hand corner, England grew more confident and domineering, pulling away to lead 20-9 at the interval and 30-9 before a Johan Goosen try forced them to concentrate again.
Many of these England players are already exceptionally good. Several can become great. Many are improving under Jones’ leadership, because he is challenging them all the time. And he has the kind of winning record that prompts players to think: ‘This guy knows what he’s doing, he can help me win things, help me have a better life.’ Jones goes so far as to say: “My job is to make myself redundant. When I’m redundant, then the team’s going to be functioning pretty well.” This day will never come of course. “When I took the job I had no expectations. All I knew was I was inheriting a very good side that was put together by Stuart Lancaster, that had oodles and oodles of talent” Jones said. “My job was to make sure that talent produced performance. But we’ve got to get better. We’re nowhere near good enough at the moment.”