NATIONS2018

REPORTS TOMORROW’S match at Murrayfield marks the completion of a cycle for Eddie Jones as he prepares to revisit the scene of his first engagement as England head coach.

The 2016 Calcutta Cup game, a drab affair won 15-9 by England, marked the start of the present golden era of almost uninterrupted success which has brought New Zealand within sight at the summit of the world game.

So at the start of this week Jones asked his computer whizzes to dig out the footage of the first training session he took with the squad to see how far they had actually come.

Watching it brought back his initial impressions of the squad he had inherited and which by and large remains intact. They were damning.

England now may be the world’s No2 side and the Six Nations champions but back then, in the Australian’s eyes they were not fit for purpose.

“I remember after the first training run I was thinking, ‘Goodness me, what have I got myself into here?’” said Jones.

“They weren’t fit. After 20 minutes, they were just shot. They couldn’t run any more. They wanted to play a system of attack, a system of defence, and I thought, ‘This is going to be hard work’.

“The basics of Test match rugby is physical condition. You’ve got to be fit enough to play. How many games have you seen the All Blacks win in the last 20 minutes? Plenty. And that’s because they practise it. We practise it too because we’ve got the base now to be able to do that.

“We’ve been looking at a bit of data and, conservatively, we’ve improved 40 per cent. Conservatively. And we’ve still got another 20 per cent to go.”

Captain Dylan Hartley thought he was fit at the time – and measured as a professional athlete he was – but the conditioning Jones was seeking was rugby-specific.

“Eddie said, ‘You may be able to run and lift, but can you get back off the floor?’ The programme here has driven rugby fitness. We’re