Jones has the most to lose this weekend
Steady Eddie will be feeling the pressure as opposing coaches play pass the parcel mind games in build-up to World Cup semifinal
It’s felt like Eddie Jones and Steve Hansen have been playing pass the parcel this week. Hansen, on the eve of this World Cup, wrapped up a giant bag of pressure, stuck a bow on it and suggested that it would be landing in the lap of those teams unaccustomed to finding themselves burdened with expectation.
He never actually named who he thought would go all mushy in the head come the knockout rounds, but Jones obviously felt that Hansen believed England would be all sweaty palms and racing pulse this week, brains fried by the enormity of the occasion and just a little terrified that their fans are growing in confidence about what might happen this weekend.
Jones, at his infamously provocative press conference on Tuesday, tried to hand that parcel back and say that it really belonged to the All Blacks.
He pooh-poohed the whole All Blacks don’t feel pressure thing and said it would be “chasing them down the street” while little old England, with nothing to lose, would be feet up, smoking jackets on and pipes lit such was their relaxed state.
The smart people easily picked that Jones was deflecting — trying to create a distraction to ease the pressure on his players given none of them have played in a World Cup semifinal.
But only the really smart ones will have picked that by feeling the need to deflect, Jones was in fact projecting the pressure he is feeling.
Of all the protagonists this weekend, he is the one who stands most exposed as he has the most to lose.
As Hansen said a few times this week, the semifinal will not define the All Blacks and it probably won’t define England.
But it will define Jones’ English tenure and possibly even his career.
There’s a large number of people in both camps who desperately want a victory, but there is only one man who desperately needs a victory. And that is Jones, who beneath the wisecracking veneer, is being spun emotionally by the knowledge that everything — his job, his legacy, his future — rides on the outcome of this game.
If England lose, the players will survive. They will come again. But Jones might not and all that business of spies being at the training ground and All Blacks mental skills coach Gilbert Enoka supposedly being run off this feet this week can’t hide the fact that the parcel Hansen stuck a bow on a few weeks back, is now sitting in Jones’ lap.
He knows it and his outlandish claims and near comedic performance which went off the scale, suggests he is feeling it.
Feeling it like he has never felt it before and as hard as he tried to hand that pressure parcel back to the All Blacks this week, in doing so, what he’s really done is reveal the extent of his own fears.
What he may also have done is inflict his players with the same sense of vulnerability and anxiety and rather than shield them from the pressure, perhaps he’s just given them the most powerful reminder of its existence.
Jones has been brilliant for England. He’s given them belief, confidence in who they are and how they can play.
He’s given them pride and identity, won a world record 18 consecutive tests and two Six Nations titles that included a Grand Slam in 2016.
And he’s been brilliant for rugby in a wider context. Funny, passionate, always entertaining and goodness knows the game needs more like him — men willing to sell the drama, revel in it even.
England are way beyond where they were four years ago and yet for all he has done and for all he has given there is only uncertainty about Jones’ fate should they lose to the All Blacks.
He was brought in after the 2015 World Cup where England had been humiliated at their own tournament. They didn’t make it out of their pool which hurt so much more because they failed on the back of playing dumb rugby and the coaches having made dumb selections.
Jones was brought in as the fixer, given a four-year contract, the purpose of which didn’t need any public clarification. Jones was there to bring World Cup success. He was on a task-specific mission to guide England to a title they hadn’t won since 2003 and which was starting to look as lonely and freakish as their sole victory in the football World Cup. His every waking hour in the last four years has been building towards this point and now that the moment of reckoning has arrived, it’s weighing heavily upon him as he knows that defeat will render him a nomad in the sense that no one will quite know where to place him in history.
He’ll have achieved so much and yet he will have failed. England will be his La Sagrada Familia, a project breathtaking in scale, ambition and progress, but ultimately unfinished and famous more for that than anything else.
The weight of that uncertainty can’t be burdened by him alone and there will be 23 players in white jerseys at Yokohama who will know they are playing not just for a place in a World Cup final, but to give their coach some kind of foothold in history and a nation of passionate fans some kind of catharsis after the horrors of four years ago.
In contrast, Hansen’s legacy is safe.
He’s found a favourable place in history already and this tournament won’t define his career in the same way it will Jones’.
This tournament has no real power to impact Hansen negatively. It will hurt to come up short. The disappointment will be intense but when a coach has a near 90 per cent win ratio over an eight-year period and a World Cup victory in the tank, can it really all be wiped if the All Blacks lose to England in Yokohama?
Hansen has the luxury of knowing there is only upside for him.
A tenure currently marked at A, will jump to an A-plus, or maybe it would be fairer to say that a tenure currently marked at A-plus, will jump to A-plus, plus, but either way defeat won’t see him drop a grade.
Hansen’s security must only accentuate Jones’ lack of it and act as another little blade, digging into the psyche of an England team via the angst of their coach.
Jones has been the entertainment star of the week and tried to hide his tension behind brilliant one-liners.
But the music has stopped and the parcel is in his lap.
He must now take a wrapper off and see what lies within and find out whether he and his players have the resilience to cope with what they find.