Flummoxed Jones has lost his air of invincibility
EDDIE Jones stood in the soulless underbelly of England’s HQ, looking not one bit like a master of the universe. He didn’t know what had happened. He didn’t know why it started, he didn’t know when it was going to stop. He didn’t know what created it, or what could be done to bring it to an end. He only knew that it would end, but he couldn’t say how, or when. He could not have appeared less convincing had he decided to interpret England’s abrupt decline with puppets.
He was asked if it was intention to debrief his employers at the RFU on what was nothing short of a debacle. ‘Do you think I should?’ he shot back. Well, not unless it was going to be better than this. ‘Search me’ isn’t much of an explanation, but it was all Jones was offering, for now.
We build them up, these coaches, these architects of sporting greatness, yet in adversity how different do they prove to be? Jones, and his players, have seemed no more adept at halting a slide than Stuart Lancaster was at the Rugby World Cup. Indeed, had this performance against Ireland followed directly on from that back yard humiliation there would have been some logic.
Throughout this competition, England have made basic errors, conceded foolish penalties, failed to respond to the officiating or changing match situations, much as they did in 2015. Indeed, had this been the first display under Jones it would have made sense. There was work to be done. We all knew England’s weaknesses; we all knew the crisis of confidence that would follow such a huge setback. It wasn’t as if this was his 28th game in.
Yet that was the problem on Saturday. It was his 28th game in. The first 18 he had won. Numbers 19 on contained four defeats, including back to back losses to Ireland and culminating in England’s poorest Six Nations display since 1983, when in a five team championship Dick Greenwood’s England recorded three defeats and a lone draw, i n Wales, and f i nished bottom.
Those were different ti mes, though. England only won a single championship outright between 1963 and 1991. Jones coaches a team that has won two of the last three — one a Grand Slam — and three in the last eight. England expect to be considerably more competitive now: and not least because they have gone out on a limb and spent quite a lot of money to employ Eddie Jones.
A super coach, an import — even with the admission of failure inherent in that decision — is an insurance policy against further disaster. Employing Jones cannot guarantee a World Cup victory, but the plan was to at least guard against the slap in the face of three years ago, when Lancaster marshalled the first host nation to fail to emerge from the group stage. Yet is history repeating?
Saturday saw precisely the level of performance that did for England at the World Cup. Good teams find ways to win and, previously, England under Jones have done that. Going right back to his very first game in Scotland, in the 2016 Six Nations, there have been times when England have been less than majestic, but have battled through. Now, they cannot even do that.
Jones said it was easier to make big fixes early on and that much is true. It wasn’t hard for England to seem better after such a disappointing World Cup. Even so, Jones exceeded all expectations. A Grand Slam in his first season, three Test wins in Australia. No wonder everyone bought so eagerly into his methodology.
This is now the difficult stuff, Jones claimed. How to react when everyone knows what you are about. And Ireland are the better team right now, the table and recent performances confirm that.
Yet at Twickenham with a point to prove it was felt England might rise to the occasion, even if it wasn’t pretty. They would find a way to win, as 2016. They couldn’t.
TADHG Furlong was voted man of the match: heart of a bull, strength of a lion, but the hands of a magician in his position. There were many other contenders, all in green. CJ Stander is fast approaching the match of any number eight in the world, Conor Murray dictated the pace of the game as a scrum-half should and Jacob Stockdale set a Six Nations scoring record.
Ireland are the team that will truly challenge the All Blacks in the clash of the hemispheres later this year; the meeting with England is now relegated to the undercard.
What has been lost this winter is the air of invincibility, not just that of England, but of Jones, too. It was possible to view last year’s defeat in Dublin as a one-off. All coaches lose matches, even ones that turn Grand Slams into mere championships. Yet, that day marked the chip in the veneer, the pure faith invested in Jones, that he was always right, that a sequence of victories brooked no argument, no dissent. Dylan Hartley as captain? Don’t worry, Eddie knows. Semesa Rokoduguni, man of the match against Fiji, dropped against Argentina? Eddie knows. Elliot Daly, in, out, in, out. Eddie knows.
That unshakeable conviction is now lost. That doesn’t mean it cannot be regained, just that Jones no longer has an unblemished sequence of results to fall back on if his case does not convince. So when he says that England lack leaders, yet insists on removing the captain with 20 minutes remaining i n every game, nobody falls back on the comforting notion that he must be right, because he’s Eddie. Maybe he isn’t. Maybe that makes no sense.
Even the make-up of his XV is a sign of changing attitudes. Ten changes, seven personnel, three positional, would once have been viewed as a sign of Jones relentless quest to make England world number one. Now it appears the act of a coach throwing the play-book up in the air in a desperate attempt to arrest a collapse that has him stumped. Jones spoke of moments of good fortune that can change a team’s destiny. And, yes, it does happen.
Yet he wasn’t employed in the hope England would get lucky; he was employed to remove random factors and games of chance. To create leaders, and winners, and a mentality that was not vulnerable to doubt from a single defeat spreading like wildfire. Jones has not become a bad coach overnight, but England have become a poor team. He doesn’t need to hand his homework in for the RFU to mark, but he needs to address this decline with fresh ideas, and quick.