SPIRO: Wallabies alert, here comes Eddie Jones and his new England warriors!

The Rugby Football Union has finally got something right with the appointment of Eddie Jones as head coach of England through to the 2019 Rugby World Cup tournament.

If any coach can make England a rugby power once again, it is Jones. He has many similarities, as a coach and a personality, with Sir Clive Woodward, the last and only coach of England to have won the Webb Ellis trophy.

Jones was born and bred in Australia, with an Australian father and a Japanese-American mother. He is invariably optimistic, chippy, smart-arsed, obsessed with getting results, often with controversial and sometimes muddle-headed views on everything that takes in the world of rugby.

His career as a coach has fluctuated from the brilliantly successful to the abysmal.

He took over the Brumbies in 1998 and, after his team crashed to a 10th-place finish out of 12 teams, confessed that he was “way out of his depth”.

But in 2000 he guided the Brumbies to a losing final against the Crusaders before winning the Super 12 tournament in 2001. The Brumbies became the first side out of New Zealand to win the tournament, a terrific achievement for the franchise and the coach.

This was the brilliant Jones.

After a stint coaching the Wallabies, Jones came back to Super Rugby in 2007 with a three-year contract with the Reds. Jones adopted a mad professor approach to the tactics used by the Reds. They played a rugby league, one-up game with the players virtually forbidden to move the ball to an outside player.

The result was a season where the Reds won only two matches and were defeated by a Super Rugby record margin of 89 points in their last match against the Bulls at Pretoria. Spectators stayed away from supporting the Reds in their thousands.

Jones resigned before he was booted out.

This was the abysmal Jones.

This same pattern in Super Rugby, a brilliant ascent and an abysmal descent, had been repeated with the Wallabies.

Jones inherited one of the great Wallabies sides from coach Rod Macqueen in 2001. Macqueen’s side won the 1999 Rugby World Cup and then consolidated this triumph with a series victory over the British and Irish Lions.

Jones took this side to a Tri-Nations victory in 2001, and a Rugby World Cup final in 2003.

But in 2005 the Wallabies lost seven straight Tests, showing shades of Alan Jones at the end of his career as a Wallabies coach, and Jones (the Eddie version) was booted out of his job by the ARU. This happened even before a review of his performance had started.

Eddie Jones left the Wallabies with a chronic scrum problem that has plagued the side now for a decade. It was said that he had calculated that scrums occupied about eight minutes of a Test (if only!). So he allocated only eight minutes of his training sessions to his scrum preparation.

Whether this gossip that circulated in rugby circles is true or not, it is astonishing that a former hooker should, as a coach, have allowed the Wallabies scrum to have the resistance strength of scrambled eggs.

I don’t know why this was allowed to happen but I might put forward some pop psychology as some sort of answer.

We go back to Jones the hooker. He was small, lively, and tremendously effective around the field playing more like a league hooker with his passing and one-off dashes than a rugby hooker using hard shoulders to move the opposition pack backwards.

It is one of the famous stories of Australian rugby that Bob Dwyer, a Randwick doyen, selected Randwick’s second grade hooker, the bulky Phil Kearns, over the Randwick and NSW starting hooker, Jones, for the Wallabies hooking job.

This selection decision by Dwyer must have rankled Jones. Could it be that his way of dealing with it was to downgrade the importance of the bulky scrumming hooker when he became the Wallabies coach? Just a thought.

Jones as the Wallabies coach was obsessed with trying to impose the certainty of league play on the general chaos of the rugby game.

His Wallabies were instructed to submit quickly in a tackle in order to allow a quick play-the-ball in the form of a fast ruck. He was said to have got this idea from the veteran league coach, Brian Smith.

The Jones control-freak obsession – a passion shared both by Eddie and Alan – led to his instruction that the Wallabies were, say, to complete a set move even when an early runner was in the clear and had a clear run to the line.

A workaholic and control freak in his own life, Jones tried to impose the same sort of disciplines on his Wallabies and the way they played.

This Jones control-freak approach made the Wallabies very robotic, easy to defend against and to attack. And as a consequence the Wallabies were easy to defeat by well prepared opponents.

It seems to me that the road to Damascus moment in the evolution of Jones from a good but rather obsessional coach to a potentially great coach came when he was asked by Jake White to be his technical adviser in preparing the South African Springboks for the 2007 Rugby World Cup.

Nick Mallett, a very good Springboks coach in his own right, insists that it was Jones’s optimistic spirit, his ingenuity and general sense of always being positive that lifted the dour Springboks to achieve their great and unexpected victory in France.

Jones has brokered a successful international coaching career from that campaign, culminating in the great prize of being appointed to coach England from now until the 2019 World Cup.

The irony is that White virtually threw himself at the feet of the England rugby power brokers to get this appointment and was rejected without even the consolation of an interview for someone he had promoted.

Jones comes to the England job at the right age, 53. He is experienced. He has had his ups and downs. He has always, to his credit, been an acute observer about rugby, even when his coaching record did not reflect his deep knowledge or insights.

The catalyst for his appointment was the stunning performance by Japan in the 2015 World Cup. The Brave Blossoms won three of their four pool matches. They did not make the final, the only time in Rugby World Cup history that a side with three pool round victories has failed to do so.

But even more impressive than the three wins was the phenomenal victory of the Brave Blossoms over the Springboks in their first match of the 2015 tournament.

The Brave Blossoms scored a try, after 16 phases of play, with several minutes of over-time on the clock, to defeat the Springboks 34-32.

The victory was hailed as the greatest upset in Rugby World Cup history, the first time a minnow rugby nation had defeated a top tier rugby nation. Sports journalists speculated whether it was the greatest upset in world sport.

Certainly the victory and manner in which it was achieved, with clinical set piece play, patience and skill with the ball, and then passion and determination in the burst to the try line, reflected tremendous credit on the coach and his players.

World Rugby made a controversial call in awarding the Coach of the Tournament to Michael Cheika for getting the Wallabies through the pool of death and into the final.

But this was the fourth time in eight World Cup tournaments that the Wallabies have made the final (1991, 1999, 2003 and 2015).

Steve Hansen took the All Blacks to back-to-back Rugby World Cup victories. No team had previously achieved this. Surely he was coach of the tournament?

But if Hansen wasn’t given the accolade, then what about Jones’s achievement in coaching the Brave Blossoms to a historic victory over the Springboks and winning three of their four matches in what was, in retrospect, the real Pool of Death?

All that now is past history. Real time is now. And we had had some vintage Jones tongue-lashings already in the first week of his reign as England’s coach.

The All Blacks have been bagged for being kick-happy: “Everyone says New Zealand are a great attacking side, and they are, but they kick the ball more than anyone.”

He is going to change the way England play, but he intends to add more speed and width to their game: “Traditionally speaking, England have been strong at set piece and had a bulldog defence… What we have to do is create a unique style of play, a style that suits us.”

It will be interesting to see if Jones can find the players who will play a faster and more skilful game than England usually delivers.

And how will the younger players, particularly, react to the Jones tendency to lecture and harangue? “You can be a devil one minute and an angel the next,” Jones told a Japanese reporter who queried him on his somewhat abrasive approach to his players.

During the 2015 Rugby World Cup, Jones described Chris Robshaw, the captain of England as “an outstanding club player but at the international level he just doesn’t have that point of difference. He carries okay, he tackles okay, but he is not outstandingly good in any area.”

This is a fair insight. No successful coach from the southern hemisphere would have played Robshaw as their number seven. Nor would they have made him the captain of his side.

Look at what Vern Cotter did when he took over Scotland. He scoured New Zealand for Scottish-eligible young loose forwards. He immediately snaffled two and put them in the Scotland squad immediately.

You would think that Jones will do something the same. He famously, as a young coach, went to a rugby league trial and spotted a likely player who he recruited and who became the legendary George Smith.

I would say this to South African, New Zealand, Australian officials, if you have any talented loose forwards who could play for England because of the birth place of their grandparents or parents, sign them up, now! Before Jones does.

Jones has, correctly, pointed out how “dour” Six Nations rugby generally is. He has made the interesting point that Italy have been in the Six Nations for 16 years and haven’t really improved.

On the other hand, Argentina has been in the Rugby Championship for only four years. Now they are a top tier side and are playing, as their demolition of the Barbarians revealed, superb attacking, ensemble rugby.

Jones also wants the RFU to start controlling its players through a centralised contracts system, like the SANZAR countries and Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

It is safe to say that until the RFU controls its players, rather than the clubs, that England will never develop its potential as the country with far and away the country with the most number of adult players.

It is so far, so good for Eddie Jones. February 6, 2016 at Murrayfield against Scotland, though, is his and England’s moment of truth.

Then in June there are the three Wallabies-England Tests. This will be Australia’s moment of truth about the Jones appointment.

I have been struck about how supportive former Wallabies like George Gregan have been about a former Wallabies coach but now an England convert. (Jones: “I’ll be 100 per cent committed to England.”)

When the England public went into a frenzy at the start of the War of Jenkins’ Ear against Spain, England’s prime minister remarked: “They are ringing the bells, they soon will be wringing their hands.”

Will Gregan and the other supportive former Wallabies be so effusive when the anti-Wallabies barbs start to pour out from ‘Pommie’ Eddie Jones and are followed, perhaps, by England victories over the Wallabies?