BACKED INTO A CORNER
In the midst of another mediocre Six Nations campaign, England head coach Jones may need to beat Ireland on Saturday to save his job
FOR MUCH of his long career, Eddie Jones seemed to revel in the role of truthteller. He was the plain-speaking Aussie who punctured bombast, who called as it was, and who didn’t care much what you thought. When he got the England job, he declared he wasn’t appointed to help academy players. Winning Test matches was the point.
Now, he is reduced to scrubbing around for a line to spin amid the growing mound mediocrity that constitutes England’s form for over a year.
After watching his team lose to Scotland in round one and overcome hapless Italy in round two, Jones recast England’s remaining matches as a quarter-final, semi-final, and final, the decider being a tilt at the championship in Paris in two weeks.
‘On to the semi-final,’ he declared, after watching his side wobble so badly against the Welsh that they almost lost a match they had been winning 17-0.
England are a mess, to the point that straight-shooter Jones is now trying to peddle PR to sustain belief around his team.
There are well-respected critics already calling for Jones to go. He survived a review into last year’s championship, but were England to finish another campaign with a record of two wins from five games, the pressure to fire him on the RFU would be intense. And with Ireland in Twickenham and France in Paris rounding off their schedule this month – and with the team playing stilted, unconvincing rugby – the prospect of them beating the two teams who look out on their own in this competition, over consecutive weekends, must be judged remote.
Change was being pushed by a number of commentators after last year’s undistinguished English Six Nations, but the November series was a good one for England: they hammered Tonga, beat Australia well and then inched past the world champions South Africa, with a point to spare.
The month was distinguished by the form of younger players, in particular, and Jones sounded confident at the end of the series.
‘For some reason there was this chemistry in that group and it just took off,’ he said.
‘Then you put them back with a few of the established players and again you don’t really know what’s going to happen. But they seem to have gelled really well, they have a nice feel about them. And when you have that nice feel they tend to fight a bit harder.’
The star of the new generation is Marcus Smith. The 23-year-old Harlequins out-half made his debut last June but it was his starts in November against Australia and, in particular, South Africa that saw him cast as England’s latest inspiration.
He kicked a late penalty to beat the Springboks, and, crucially, he has maintained that form into the championship – but England as a whole have not. That means criticism of Jones has resumed, but Smith, the youngster he has promoted, now constitutes one of his best defences, with the coach able to argue that he is building for next year’s World Cup.
Smith scored all of England’s points in their opening defeat to Scotland, and 18 of their 23 as they eventually beat Wales by four last weekend.
He scored a try and made two others in an easy win over Italy in between those two matches, which prompted Jones to claim there is ‘no ceiling’ to how good Smith can be.
The No10 is certainly the main source of excitement around the side now, and England’s plans for Twickenham on Saturday will rely heavily on him.
But in promoting Smith and backing him and others, most obviously the full back Freddie Steward and No 8 Alex Dombrandt, Jones is selling the idea of a rebooted England, in the absence of the injured Owen Farrell and the exiled Vunipola brothers.
Jones is not afraid of a bold call or grand gesture, but the problem is that he has two games to justify benching proven winners like Mako and Billy Vunipola, and trusting that Smith can win big Tests against the likes of Ireland and France while a veteran like George Ford sits on the sidelines.
Depending on the circumstances of a defeat, he can probably afford to lose one of the next two matches. Lose both, though, and he will struggle to keep his job – not that he’ll let on he feels the pressure.
Bob Dwyer, like Jones a former coach of the Wallabies, was known as Barb Dwyer because of his prickliness, but even he has noted the brutal nature of Jones’ candour.
‘I consider myself a very direct Australian, but Eddie is more so than I am,’ Dwyer once said. ‘He takes no prisoners at all.’
Jones got the England job primarily on the back of an outstanding 2015 World Cup with Japan, and was unbeaten in his first 18 Tests with England.
But he then lost five matches in a row in 2018, including the Grand Slam-winning Irish performance amid flurries of snow at Twickenham on St Patrick’s weekend.
A year later, he oversaw one of the greatest performances in England’s history when they vanquished New Zealand in the World Cup semi-final, but then they flat-lined in the final against South Africa.
Swings from high to low have been the recurring feature of his six years in the job, and he has often spoken about the importance of tension in a working environment, believing that it steels people and stands to them in critical moments.
However, that culture
Eddie is a very direct Australian. He takes no prisoners at all
came under unprecedented attention last October, when The Times newspaper published an exhaustive report on life in the England camp under Jones. It wasn’t pretty.
A strong focus of the piece was the departure of John Mitchell as defence coach last summer, three months after signing a contract extension.
Mitchell is a big name in the sport, a former New Zealand coach and considered, like Jones, one of the alpha figures in Test arena.
It was reported that he left after a row with Jones about Mitchell’s desire to go and see his son, a professional cricketer, play for Middlesex. Jones wanted Mitchell to work, even though it was a day off, but Mitchell went and he left his job shortly thereafter.
This was merely the highestprofile departure from a cast of supporting staff that is in nearconstant flux: England will go to the 2023 World Cup with an entirely new coaching staff under Jones – provided the head coach makes it that far.
Richard Cockerill was added as forwards’ coach last September. He is a combustible figure whose time at Edinburgh ended among rumours of toxic fall-outs with players.
Jones went to rugby league for other recruits in attack coach Martin Gleeson and Anthony Seibold, an Australian in charge of defence. Matt Proudfoot was hired from South Africa’s World Cup-winning support staff to oversee the scrum. Seibold is the third defence coach to work under Jones, but that is only a flavour of the incessant change he has overseen One statistic is telling: England used five different sports psychologists in the four seasons under Jones leading up to the last World Cup. This is not an area of a team’s preparation ordinarily associated with convulsive change, but throughout the tortuous narrative of Jones support staff, similar instances abound, from the high-profile coaching changes through medical staff, physios and analysts.
This has been a feature of his tenure from the start, but the level of insight in The Times revelations was the result of what seemed an extensively sourced investigation.
The England culture under Jones was described by one mole as marked by ‘verbal abuse, pressure, belittling’.
There was the analyst sacked as the squad made their way through an airport, or the sports scientist asked to leave a staff meeting by an angry Jones, who then left his job to work with the Wallabies.
An unnamed player told The Times that Jones treated his staff in a way that was ‘brutal, rude, aggressive’.
In the early years of Jones’ England reign, it was practice to list all the support staff in the match programme for Twickenham Tests. This was discontinued because of the rate of turnover.
A player spoke about the atmosphere around England camps. ‘You speak to the guys from Scotland, Ireland and Wales and they have such good fun. I wish we could be more like that.’
In a column in the English edition
of this newspaper, Mike Brown detailed a falling out with Jones ahead of the 2019 World Cup.
Brown was not selected for the squad but, before it was settled, Brown and Jones spoke one on one, with the coach branding Brown a defensive full back.
The player countered that he could do more, and cited statistics from his season with his club, Harlequins.
‘He did not like that I had contested what he said and went mad,’ recalled Brown. ‘He shouted, “Well you lost the f ****** ball in contact on Saturday, didn’t you? That’s f ****** not good enough. You’re not f ****** doing everything you can”.
Brown never played for England again.
And on the revelations went. Another player told of Jones’s habit of sending texts during a game they are playing for their club, and which are then waiting for the player to read afterwards.
‘It’s not good for an athlete in the grind of a season if you come off the pitch from a club game and the first message you see – he’s clearly texted during the game – is telling you you’ve blown an opportunity.
‘It’s basically saying ‘You’re shit’ in a one-liner. That’s not good for people’s confidence or wellbeing, especially if you’ve just lost a game or not played as well as you wanted to.’
Jones gave an interview subsequent to the revelations in which he sought to give his side. Interestingly, it did not amount to a rejection of the story.
‘These things happen. Everyone has an opinion on how you operate. I can’t say it’s right or wrong, I try to be a reasonable person,’ Jones said.
England’s depth, quality and the experience of their coach have helped Jones right previous wobbles.
Lose on Saturday, though, and the great warrior will be exposed, vulnerable – and on the verge of losing his job.
He did not like that I had contested what he said and he went mad