Jones given plenty to think about by great entertainers
England coach’s march to world domination looks to be faltering after this wake-up call
Before this match, Eddie Jones questioned the wisdom of trying to excite a crowd. “Test-match coaching is not as brutal as football, but if you want to just entertain people, you generally find you are not in the job too long,” he said. For Scotland and for rugby, the longer Gregor Townsend stays in the post the better.
We knew Scotland would counterattack. We knew a sunny day might be conducive to self-expression. We felt a tasty contest building. But nobody expected the Scots to knock England off their path to World No1-dom with such brilliant, thrusting play.
Nor can any pundit have foreseen the poverty of England’s attacking, which drew no blood but conceded a succession of penalties. At the break, with Townsend’s men leading 22-6, a Scotland fan shouted at England’s glass coaching box: “Jones, what’s the score?” And Twickenham’s darlings were jeered from the field by the home crowd.
Jones rushed downstairs to try to repair the damage of a ruinous first-half. On Thursday, at their camp in Surrey, the England head coach shared the impressions he formed two years ago when his new team won this fixture 15-9 to begin a sequence of 24 wins in 25 games. His abiding thought, he said, was: “What have I let myself in for?” He doubted their fitness and their tactics.
At half-time in Edinburgh two years on, Jones was probably feeling something similar. A mix of Scottish joie de vivre and English mediocrity was jeopardising not only the quest to win three NatWest Six Nations titles in a row but the whole Twickenham mission of world domination.
The idea that England are on a path of relentless self-improvement, with ever-tougher minds and stronger bodies, was being blown away by Scottish enterprise. Jones said he has improved the fitness of his players by 40 per cent, with 20 per cent more to come. But more importantly, he had turned them into winners no longer trapped in a cycle of ‘development’ and ‘promise.’
If England could be torn apart like this, with Finn Russell and Huw Jones running amok, how would they cope against New Zealand, the world champions and masters of snatch-and-go?
Jones said: “We for some reason at the start of the game lacked intensity, invited them to the game. They took advantage and raced away.”
All the strengths of his team – the bullying pack, the 10-12 combination of George Ford and Owen Farrell, the dash of Jonny May and Anthony Watson out wide – drained away in the face of Scotland’s fluid, sometimes risky passing and movement. Russell’s spin-pass from deep to start the move for Sean Maitland’s try on 31 minutes was a classic gamble with a beautiful reward.
Scotland, remember, were looking for their first Calcutta Cup win since 2008 and their first Murrayfield try in the fixture since Simon Danielli’s in 2004.
Fourteen years on, they ran in three in 37 minutes. As Scotland seized a 25-13 lead with 13 minutes left, from a penalty conceded by Sam Underhill (who was sent to the sin-bin) for a ‘no arms’ tackle, England’s vaunted ‘finishers’ flowed on to the field. Here was another theory under strain: that however tight things are, England’s replacements would always come on to finish the job, such is the depth of their resources. But no gang of substitutes can be expected to rectify a start this bad, especially when the opposition are so inspired.
“Test-match rugby is about winning, it’s not about entertainment,” Jones told us. “If you want entertainment, watch Super Rugby. It’s about winning and they [England] have found a way to win.”
This remains a reasonable point, in the context of England’s past failures – especially the 2015 World Cup. Yet flaws have opened up again in their make-up. The perfect preparation they spoke of will now be seen as complacency, or presumption, not on the part of the coaches – but certainly the players, who were blind to the threat of Scotland’s ambitious attacking and were clumsy and indisciplined in their own efforts to breach the home defence.
This 25-13 Scotland win will have no trouble finding a place in the pantheon of rugby in these parts, not least because it was inspired by the thing England dismissed in the build-up. Not a desire to ‘entertain’ so much as a clever use of all Scotland’s biggest assets – and their spirit. All the messages England have been sending themselves were torn to shreds.
This is not the end for them as potential World Cup winners, but they face a disquieting truth: they have now lost two of their last four Six Nations games.
“These are lessons you don’t want to have,” Jones said, “and they’re the best lessons in the world.”