ENGLAND’S FATAL FLAW
Eddie’s men self-destruct too easily... he has just six months to fix it
No team in the world will not see them as vulnerable
THERE was a time when Eddie Jones could cheerfully defy all logic and have his audience faithfully nodding along. He seemed a miracle worker back then.
Transforming the worst performing World Cup hosts of all time into Grand Slam winners within a year. Jones’ England over-performed; as did his words. Those days are gone.
Closing in on a World Cup he was employed, specifically, to win, England over-perform no longer. It could be argued he has guided the best team at the Six Nations to second place.
The first 30 minutes against Scotland, the first half in Wales, the entire match in Dublin, would all suggest England are an exciting multi-faceted team and Jones had potential Grand Slam winners on his hands.
Yet it is Wales, often functional, yet exemplary when it mattered, who have walked away with the third Grand Slam of Warren Gatland’s tenure.
Ireland may have peaked too early for Japan and it is Wales, not England, who will travel east later this year as the best Europe can offer. Yet, along with Italy, Wales were the only nation in the tournament not to earn a bonus point for scoring four tries in a match.
England did it four times in five games, yet crumbled at key moments.
Gatland is getting a tune out of Wales that Jones, for all his compelling rhetoric, cannot draw from England.
After what was close to being, bottom line, the biggest cock-up in the history of Test rugby, Jones (below) said England’s problem was playing under pressure. Then he said he could fix that in six months in time for the tournament in Japan. Then he said it was a problem he inherited as part of the fall-out from the 2015 World Cup.
So it was a problem he hasn’t been able to solve in three-and - a- half years, but could be sorted in six months?
‘I’m going to have the players for three months, and I’ve never had that before,’ said Jones, blithely. And time was everyone would have bought that. He was Fast Eddie, after all. He got things done.
But 31- 0 up, to 31-38 down, is no shortterm repair. There is not a team in the world who will not see England as vulnerable after this.
‘You do that in a pool game against Tonga and you could find yourself in a difficult position going forward,’ said Jones. Perhaps he meant the result, but the circumstances of it cut deeper. No team in the world, 15 points down, will think they are out of a game against England after this. The capacity for selfdestruction, for complete loss of momentum, is too great. Jones exudes confidence. That’s his style. And when results are backing him up it’s a winning combination. At other times, it can seem glib. He identified a mountain of a problem with England and then discussed it as if it were a molehill; one that can be scaled with the addition of another guru to his team, although he wouldn’t name names. He is close to Gareth Southgate, who enlisted the help of Pippa Grange to help his players deal with the pressure of tournaments, and specifically penalties, before the 2018 World Cup. A similar figure, definitely female, perhaps Antipodean, would make sense.
And a good job something does because this was the weekend when reason was chased out of Twickenham with flaming torches. At one stage England were scoring at more than a point a minute: 29 minutes gone, 31 points up.
They were looking at a record score and seasoned Scottish internationals were talking about an outcome from which it would be hard to recover: they were talking the sport, as much as the team.
To then concede the same number of points, unopposed, in 25 minutes made no sense. Ben Youngs said he couldn’t get his head around it, and he was far from alone.
While Gatland has found ways to make Wales win, even on days when they can be little more than efficient — although they were brilliant against Ireland on Saturday — England continue finding ways to disappoint, as happened at the World Cup. Jones insists the 2015 hangover has yet to wear off.
‘Whenever you have a difficult tournament or a difficult game, there is always a lingering thought process,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what it’s like: you’ve some hand grenades in the back of the jeep and sometimes under pressure they go off.
‘We’ve got a few of those and we’ve just got to get rid of them. It’s the way you think under pressure and the team’s probably had it since the 2015 World Cup. We’ve been working on a process to fix it and I think
we’ll get it right. But it takes time.
‘Wales are going through a very good trot, but we went through a trot like that and we still had the problem even when we won 18 games in a row.
‘Everybody goes through this. I remember coaching against the All Blacks. We won something like 45 per cent of our Tests against them and always in the last 20 minutes of the game. You put that pressure on and it took them eight years to work out how to get out of it.
‘Now we don’t have eight years, but we’ve had four and we’re still learning. So we’re going to do it in half the time it took the All Blacks.
‘This is not a new problem, this is consistent in teams and you don’t click your fingers and fix it. Do you know how many World Cups it took the All Blacks to fix? Get some perspective about what we’re talking about. When we won those 18 games I always knew this was sitting there.’
HE has a point. New Zealand won the inaugural World Cup in 1987 and then no more until 2011. It took the best rugby nation in the world until 2015 to win the tournament on foreign soil. So pressure is a giant factor in team performance.
Yet Wales were under enormous pressure in Cardiff on Saturday but from the opening minutes the win over Ireland was not in doubt.
Gatland, again, found a way — just as he did last summer as coach of the British and Irish Lions in New Zealand. Sent up as a clown in his own country, he faced enormous personal pressure, yet somehow squared the series, the Lions having led for three minutes of 240 across three Test matches.
So what is the difference between these unstable munitions in the back of Jones’ jeep — and, worryingly against Scotland, none more so than his captain Owen Farrell — and old fashioned human error?
Youngs refuted Jones’ theory about pressure getting to England, instead citing individual mistakes.
‘I wouldn’t agree at all that we don’t handle pressure,’ he said.
‘When the game gets tight all you need to do is your job. If you’re carrying the ball, decide whether to offload it or not, whether you take a quick throw or not; you’re accountable.
‘So I don’t think it’s pressure, I think we need to have a greater understanding of where the momentum of the game is, and what we want, what we’re about, to get back to basics.
‘A couple of points in defence, couple of points in attack, hang our hats on that and let’s do it, let’s own our roles and make that our responsibility. A lot of these are individual decisions and some of it was really disappointing, just mental lapses.
‘Had the game been tighter earlier would we be doing some of those things? Absolutely we wouldn’t. We got trapped into that circus of trying to chuck it around, and that’s not us.’
Yet England are a better side than a year ago. At their best they played the finest rugby in the tournament. The problem with their fatal flaw is that it is intangible. It is not something that can be coached, or drilled into them. It is what Jones calls the top two inches.
He says he can fix it in six months; but then he says a lot of things.