Jones savours another satisfying victory over his old sparring partner
England coach swaps his grimace for a grin while it is Australian foe Cheika’s turn to self-combust
Two peas in a pod, Eddie Jones and Michael Cheika. Both bruisers in the flesh, both deceptive sophisticates when you scratch a little deeper. Not for nothing was Jones invited to address the Oxford Union last month, while Cheika holds court in effortless Italian and French on his autumn forays to Europe, a reflection of his stints at Padova and Stade Francais. As befitting his father’s Lebanese lineage, he also speaks fluent Arabic.
Except his discourse from the stands here at Twickenham yesterday was savagely Anglo-Saxon. A week after Jones had been rebuked by his 93-year-old mother for swearing on camera, Cheika recast the template for self-combustion.
When Michael Hooper’s first-half try was disallowed for offside, Australia’s head coach made do with sarcastic applause, not to mention a few muttered oaths at young Kiwi referee Ben O’Keeffe. By the time Stephen Moore’s score was also scrubbed out for obstruction, he could bear it no longer, storming out of his box alongside Pat Molihan, his burly sidekick and all-round Man Friday. Such was his mood, it seemed fortunate Molihan was on hand to fend off the England fans goading him down the Twickenham steps.
Confrontations with England bring out the best and worst in Cheika. Who could forget his sly little fist pump for television’s benefit when his Australia side tossed England out of their own World Cup? That was still the Stuart Lancaster era, though.
Now that his old compadre Jones, whom he has known since their days tearing it up for Randwick on Sydney’s southern beaches, has assumed the England role, the dynamic has shifted, with both reverting to type.
Jones is still the sledger extraordinaire, who once nicknamed team-mate Simon Poidevin “Venus de Milo” – fine body, no hands – while Cheika channels the same combative streak that emboldened him to ask Wayne ‘Buck’ Shelford, the All Blacks’ feared No8: “Is that all you’ve got, mate?”
The accusation against the Rugby Football Union used to be that it was too obsessed with money, but the governing body would have been well advised to sell off tickets for Cheika’s press conference last night. He emerged an hour after the final whistle – enough time, in theory, to cool down from the disputed calls by the television match official (TMO) – and was still smouldering with rage. “I’m not really ranking them,” he said, witheringly, when asked if he considered any one decision more egregious than the rest.
“It’s not the Academy Awards. I’m not sure who the TMO was. I should probably have found out his name. He probably just makes his own mind up, whatever he wants.”
Jones, clearly, was loving every minute of this. The two are close friends away from the rough and tumble, but each derives no purer satisfaction than from outsmarting the other.
“I didn’t swear, I didn’t throw anything – I thought I evened it up with the other box,” Jones said, with a knowing grin. “I think my mum will be pleased. I don’t expect another call at five in the morning.”
He was not about to express any beef with O’Keeffe, a 28-year-old ophthalmologist from New Zealand, whom he described mischievously as the “best referee in the world”.
For this was not a day to cement his one-upmanship over Cheika but one to prove that England’s ascendancy continued unabated. The last time England managed a five-match winning streak against Australia, it culminated in a World Cup triumph in 2003.
This was a result to give Jones reason to believe that it could be a staging post to glory in Japan in 2019.
“Five-nil,” Jones said, contentedly, as if this were an Ashes series. A passionate cricket fan, he referred to 5-0 thrashings in Ashes of yore, daring to hope that England’s supremacy over his native green-and-gold could signal a genuine shift in the balance of power.
He is too wily a cove, though, to risk looking too far ahead. Even with a crushing win to celebrate, he highlighted – again with a cricket analogy – how Samoa could yet derail the England juggernaut next Saturday. “We’ll be back to flat off-spinners next week,” he said.
A rare day of rest today should give Jones room to savour the moment. For a week he has found his leadership questioned, after the laboured 21-8 win over Argentina, as many wondered aloud whether England had stalled. If this is what a stall looks like, then the All Blacks had better be fearful when Jones’s team start moving up through the gears for England have won 21 of 22 Tests under his watch.
True, the scoreline shone a flattering light on England, who produced a destructive late salvo. But Dylan Hartley shrugged off any hint of luck, pointing out how Jones had set them up for a “full 80-minute effort”.
“Finishers” such as Danny Care were true to their billing, while Jonathan Joseph was opportunism personified in scoring a try with his only carry of the game. Such is the way grisly arm-wrestles are won.
For an hour, this was a spectacle of enervating attrition, in conditions of such grimness at Twickenham that it felt like being in a cloud. And yet for England, these are sunlit times. The thunderous look on Cheika’s face showed he understood, for all his gripes about officiating, how thoroughly he had been beaten.