Saturday was painful and fans are fed up being told, ‘just wait for the World Cup’. It is unacceptable
WE have grown used to hearing politicians not answer questions and give us false hope. It feels exactly like that with Eddie Jones.
At some point you have to believe your eyes. Saturday at Twickenham was painful. There were quality England players on the field yet they were so far from the sum of their parts.
That is unacceptable, so the question facing the Rugby Football Union is straightforward. Do you like what you see? If you honestly do, carry on. But if you don’t, do something about it.
England have lost seven games in 2022, their worst year of results since 2008. Yet Jones has been backed unflinchingly by the RFU in the face of ever-growing evidence that what he’s selling and they’re buying, nobody else is.
I don’t think even the players believe in what they’re being asked to do because the group that lost to South Africa on Saturday (right a dejected Tom Curry), left to their own devices, would perform considerably better than that.
England have had two disastrous Six Nations and now a horrendous autumn. Jones’ tactic is to deflect blame away from the players and onto himself and remind us that the World Cup is what matters.
In any other walk of life if that was your output, and you kept putting your name to it, someone above would say, ‘Well, thanks very much, we’re going to give someone else a go’.
It’s not acceptable for fans to hear England are effectively writing off all games between World Cups as irrelevant. We want to win the next one, we want to win Six Nations, Triple Crowns, Grand Slams. What we don’t want is to hear, ‘I know we got beat again by Scotland but we’ll be awesome come the World Cup’.
RFU chief executive Bill Sweeney says it matters to him how supporters feel and that, like them, the RFU are “really disappointed” with England’s autumn.
He said the campaign would be fully reviewed by an anonymous panel. The same drill applied in March after England lost more games than they won for a second straight Six Nations.
The “experts” backed Jones, concluding there were signs of “solid progress” when everyone who paid a lot of money to watch them at Twickenham could clearly see there was none.
People are fed up with being told not to look at what’s obvious, but to dream of what could be in the future. That schtick has run its course, as far as I’m concerned.