Eddie: I’m into mime games
EDDIE JONES is to ban talking from his training sessions – and get his England players to use the power of mime instead.
Jones takes his squad to Jersey tomorrow for a five-day camp ahead of Twickenham internationals next month against Argentina, Japan, New Zealand and South Africa.
With rugby chiefs under pressure to make the sport safer, Jones has borrowed a new training tactic from American sport, aimed at improving on-field communication without adding to contact training.
“I was talking to Green Bay NFL coach Matt LaFleur, and a couple of NBA guys, about how the amount of training time is being cut in their sports,” said the Australian.
“Particularly in NBA, one of the things they do is mime training, where you can’t talk. You show the players what they have to do and they then have to do it without talking.
“It is the eye contact, being able to understand each other’s body language. We are going to have a go at doing that to see if we can accelerate the learning of the players.”
The potential benefit is obvious in the heat of battle, with 82,000 England fans screaming and players unable to hear one another. But it is also about player welfare.
“Every sport at the moment is being modified in the physical load you can do,” Jones said.
“In cricket, fast bowlers don’t bowl as much, do they? Baseball pitchers
don’t pitch as much. There’s greater welfare care in every sport and the amount of physical training you can do is being lessened. You have got to find out other ways of teaching the game.”
Training is not all that Jones wants to keep hush-hush – believing it to be essential in the games to come that England don’t reveal their World Cup playbook ahead of the tournament in France in 11 months’ time.
“The big thing for me is make sure, tactically, we keep moving, but we don’t show our hand,” he explained. “It is a balancing act, we want to keep pushing forward, but not show the opposition what we are doing.”
England’s head coach reckons protecting their trade secrets before the last World Cup in Japan played a major role in getting them to the final.
“We played New Zealand in the autumn of 2018 and got beaten 16-15, having led 15-0,” he recalled. “But that day we learned more about them than they did about us and, while it wasn’t THE factor, it was a significant contributor to us beating them in the semi-final the next year.”
Looking at next month’s opponents, England are drawn in the same World Cup pool as Argentina and Japan, and could meet the All Blacks and Springboks in the knockout stages.
“So, yeah, there’s going to be a bit of cloak and dagger,” Jones said. “We want to make sure we play well against them – but learn more about them than they learn about us.”