Behind the bravado, there’s a very humble Eddie Jones

When I spoke with England coach Eddie Jones last month, it was an interview like no other I’d done previously. Everything I thought I knew about how interviews are organised and come together was thrown out the window.

For one thing, I didn’t actually arrange the interview; it was arranged for me. And it wasn’t a case of me just calling Eddie. The RFU media guys called me, on the number I supplied, at the arranged time.

Smack bang on the arranged time, in fact, and with a courtesy call about three-quarters of an hour ahead of time, to make sure I was still good to talk with the England coach. Very military precise. Very weird.

It still involved the same amount of research and all that, and it still brought with it the standard challenges that come with interviewing anyone.

Will I be able to extract decent answers out of him? Have I strayed into cliché with any questions? Am I going to ask a dumb question? What if he just isn’t into it?

Several weeks after knocking out the magazine feature the interview was arranged for, I was reading back through the notes and found myself mentally ‘hearing’ a different Eddie Jones. There was no mass circulation, news-cycle soundbite to be gained from my interview, so a lot of his answers were really frank; thoughtful and without any dramatic hyperbole.

Take away the headline-grabbing, and the media mind-games, and you’re left with a very driven rugby man, from humble beginnings, who just wants to do the very best he can in the job he’s been hired for.

With the first Test now just days away, I thought that Eddie Jones was worth sharing, word-for-word, on a couple of different topics.

On getting the England job…

How did you feel when you were named England coach?
“Oh, just excited by the opportunity, mate.

“I’ve been lucky as a coach; I learned all my rugby in Australia, I had a great experience at the Brumbies and the Wallabies, and I love to coach at the highest level.

“I’d had my time in Australia and moved on from that, so an opportunity to coach England, the biggest union in the world with the most players, and what had been for the last 13 to 14 years an underperforming side. So it’s just a fantastic opportunity.”

It was written up at the time as an appointment coming on the back of Japan’s Rugby World Cup success last season, but how much do you think your previous Rugby World Cup success with the Wallabies and South Africa played a part?
“Undoubtedly that was the key factor. They did a lot of reference checks; I know the RFU contacted people as far back as during my time at the Brumbies. They basically went through every team that I’d ever been involved with, so obviously the success that I enjoyed with the Brumbies, and then a Rugby World Cup final with Australia certainly had a part to play in it.”

Did you think when your time with the Wallabies came to an end [at the end of 2005], that that was you done at international level?
“I thought I’d still coach Australia again, mate. And you never know, that might happen.

“I always wanted to coach again at international level; once you’ve coached at that level, you understand that it’s the most demanding but also the most exciting and most rewarding level to coach at, and just like a player, as a coach you want to coach at the highest possible level.

“So when I finished with the Wallabies, I certainly didn’t think that was the end of it, no.”

Looking on from Australia during the Six Nations, every shot off towards the stands seemed to be of you smiling ear to ear. Obviously, you wanted success straight away, but were you shocked that it came so quickly?
“Um… look, I think it was a combination of factors.

“England I think have always have had a good side, but there’s been certain things missing and we were able to find relatively quickly a couple of those. Not everything, but we were able to find a couple of those and turn the team around.

“I also think that the Six Nations standard – with Wales and Ireland probably going through a regeneration period, Scotland’s still a young side, Italy is Italy, and France are starting to find their feet again under Guy Novès – so you know, it was a fantastic opportunity for the England side.”

On the challenges in front of him rebuilding the England side…

What sort of key changes have you been able to put in place that you’ve been really pleased to see working on the field?
“Probably the biggest thing is just about the team becoming more independent. Taking more responsibility themselves.

I think with Dylan [Hartley] as the captain, that process has been reasonably successful. The team now feels like they can make decisions by themselves, where I felt before they were very structured, very automated about what they needed to do.

“If you look at northern hemisphere rugby generally, that’s how it is; it’s a very structured brand of rugby. Winning at the highest level in Test matches, you can’t just play structured rugby; you’ve obviously got to be good at the set piece, but you’ve got to be able to adjust to transition situations in the game.

“And the second thing was probably just making the players realise how much more they can all improve individually.

“Players in the northern hemisphere, and particularly England, tend to become quite comfortable. They get paid a good salary by their club, and to be successful they only have to play well for their club; playing for England, and success hasn’t been crucial to England. They’ve been happy for the last 13 years just plodding along, haven’t they.

“They hadn’t won a Grand Slam in 13 years, they’d won one Six Nations in the last 13 years [since their Rugby World Cup title in 2003].

“There hasn’t been a real massive pressure to get good results and I think the players just allowed themselves to become comfortable. They were happy to accept that, and maybe weren’t determined to be the best in the world.

“If you were to pick a World XV team last year, how many England players would’ve been in it? Probably zero, mate.

“If we want to be a serious rugby country, we’ve got to have five players in a World XV, and that’s what we’ve got to push towards. And that takes special work.”

Do you think that attitude comes back to the private club competition as opposed to the nationally run teams in the south? The five Australian sides obviously all feed into the ARU, whereas the Premiership clubs are largely private?
“Yeah, I don’t know whether that’s a significant factor. One of the major issues is that there’s 12 Premiership clubs in England. So if you’re a reasonable player, you’re going to get a contract somewhere, aren’t you, and you’re going to be reasonably well-paid.

“As opposed to Australia when we had three teams (in the old Super 12 competition), you had to be a good player to get into those three teams, and if you weren’t in those three teams you had to work your backside off to win a spot.”

On the common threads he and Michael Cheika shared to get to this series…

Were you surprised, or did it completely fit in with how you know Michael Cheika that he was able to achieve the success he did with the Wallabies in such a short period of time?
“Oh, he’s a completely driven person, mate, you just have a look at his background.

“You look back historically, the migrant families to Australia in those early periods, it was quite racist. So as a young kid growing up, you had to fight your way through. I experienced that to some extent, being half Japanese – his experience is as a Lebanese kid.

“Rugby was all about the leather patches, GPS schools; all that sort of thing. Now he’s fought his way through, had to go overseas to make his mark, so when he took over the Australian side, you knew something was going to happen.

“He did exactly the same with the Waratahs, and look at how they started the season once he’d left.”

That really will be something, won’t it, to have the Wallabies coached by someone of Lebanese extraction up against the English coach from Australia, of Japanese extraction.
“Yeah, it really will be.

“And we were both lucky, we were both coached by Bob Dwyer. To me, he was the father of modern Australian rugby. People talk about Allan Jones, and obviously I have a Randwick bias, but Bob Dwyer created an Australian style of play. At least three Australian coaches since have been coached by him. It’s an unbelievable achievement, isn’t it?”

What do you put that down to – is it just Bob Dwyer’s coaching, or was there something else in that Randwick club in the 1980s that has produced so much success?
“I think he had such a strong and really determined style of play. We played the game in a style that we thought was playing properly. We played the game at pace; we tried to move the ball. They’re all attributes that have stuck with us as coaches.

“Certainly, from my point of view, I’ve stuck with it my whole coaching career – and sometimes you pay the price for it.

“And Bob was such an influential guy, he knew so much about the game. Back then, in that late-Eighties, early-Nineties period, he was the first Australian coach to bring sports science into rugby coaching, and did it brilliantly.”

What about going up against the Wallabies? Did you allow yourself a chuckle and think this could be fun?
“Yeah, it will, and I’m just going to enjoy it. I take great pride and I owe Australian rugby a lot. I was fortunate enough to be the Australian coach, and I’m indebted for that honour, always.

“To get the honour of coaching another country against Australia is pretty special, so I’m going to enjoy it, respect it, and hopefully we play a good series, because it will be great for rugby.”