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Opinion
Hiring Eddie Jones for five years is, at the same time, the most myopic, understandable, and self-destructive move Rugby Australia has ever made. And they’ve made a lot of moves.
There are two very solid reasons to hire Jones (for one year for one World Cup) and three reasons not to hire him for two Cups and the long haul.
First, Jones is a more experienced Test coach than the man he replaces. A more successful coach. And more ruthless.
Dave Rennie seems to be a good man. A nice guy. Nicer than Eddie.
Just like Wayne Pivac is nicer than Warren Gatland, and Allister Coetzee was nicer than Rassie Erasmus, and Ian Foster is nicer than Steve Hansen was or Joe Schmidt is.
Nice guys struggle to lead teams in elite sport.
So, we can hypothesize that Eddie is more likely to take the Wallabies to one or two higher steps in the Cup than Rennie would have, just on the sheer cussedness of the man himself.
Read Jones’ two books and you will easily pick up he sees himself the hero: problems need Eddie solutions. Eddiefication. It’s unedifying, but it tends to work in the first blast.
With eight months before the big dance, a fiery Eddie over a placid Dave makes sense.
Jones could just decide to sleep two hours a night from now till then, run a hundred players through a mill, find the faint of heart and axe them, slap thirty five on the plane, find their most tender psychological parts and ramrod them into a fighting unit on the weaker side of the draw and end up in a consecutive losing final.
So, the first point is: head to head, Jones is superior to Rennie. He is more likely to find a way to beat his own team, England. He is more likely to know how to fix a team he owned (Australia). Just as the team which wins the Cup will be among the top two most capped and nasty, coaches tend to improve as they mature, until they suddenly don’t.
A point here: Rugby Australia cut Rennie off behind his knees, so that we will never know precisely how well he could have done with his big athlete play hard ethos, but Rennie also made a rod for his own back by not having a doctrine. It was hard to point to what he wanted to do, and perhaps the players did not know either, leading to them losing every single “revenge” Test in 2022.
Second reason this is good: Jones is an underdog and Australia is an underdog and he will enjoy ruffling feathers. He will create a buzz in Australia around union. The honeymoons of Eddie Jones are hot and heavy. Most journalists are afraid of him or in awe of him. He uses them easily as props for his play.
Rennie was a bit of a damp squib. His persona on camera was soporific. Even if his players loved him, the public did not.
There are four reasons this is a bad idea for Australian rugby.
First, the contract is too long. Jones tends to leave the institutions he heads in worse shape than he finds them.
Jones has dined out on three facts for too long: his pre-2015 World Cup results, 2015 Brighton (his team failed to qualify), and his record with England.
His 70% plus win rate is built on a 100% year with Stuart Lancaster’s entire team and setup. It has slid since. By the end, his team was struggling to score tries unless it was against Italy.
No English player besides Freddie Steward is better now than when he began.
More than a dozen coaches came and went around Jones; snuffing out any succession plan.
His relationship with Premiership coaches was legendarily poor.
He was fired because Twickenham Man tired of Jones taking the piss, announcing England would be the best team in the world, that they would never go past three phases, that they would have the quickest rucks, that it was all part of a plan, and then, just surrendering to Frans Malherbe, who Jones called a loosehead in his book, showing once and for all, he does not understand the value of a scrum.
(Yes, there would have been five or more fact checks and hard edits of the book, but it was a Yank publisher and it was up to Jones to know the difference between a Beast and a Buffalo).
Given that the Wallabies’ biggest long term issues are set piece, discipline, and injury numbers, Jones may be the worst possible long term fit.
Second, Jones does not age well in a setup. He tends to take things personally, invent narratives, and go after people who dare to disagree.
Rugby Australia’s dysfunctional ways from Linkgate through Folaufate, Cheikagate, Castlemate, and now, Eddielate are not going to make it easier to hire the next coach.
Which really top coach (meaning, not one fired for poor performance; perhaps a Razor or ROG) would take the job under this crew?
Third, if Jones does go down his familiar cyclical road of feast, then famine, it would coincide precisely when Australia does not need melodrama. Better to have hired him for a year like Gatland for Wales, and then give a new regime a full cycle to grow.
(Photo by David Rogers/Getty Images)
Nobody can deny Jones has knowledge of rugby at a high level. His ability to be head man for a long tenure is not established. He may have always been best as a rifleman brought in for one shot.
But he does not seem to be the academy leader like Lancaster, the systems man like Gatland, a depth and defence guru like the Bok team, or a club diplomat like Fabien Galthie.
He may end up dooming Australian rugby for the next decade, even as he may take the Wallabies to a bloody grand final this year.
Join The Roar rugby editor Christy Doran, former Wallaby Matt Toomua and a cast of regular and special guests as they look at the biggest issues in the game on The Roar Rugby Podcast. If you’re looking for great odds on the next game check out Aussie bookmaker PlayUp. Chances are you’re about to lose. Set a deposit limit.