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LYON – Richie Arnold best summed up the significant wounds suffered by Eddie Jones Wallabies in a record World Cup thumping by Wales on Monday.
“F–k mate, what didn’t go wrong?” said the Wallabies lock as devastated teammates either stopped for the most painful media commitments of their careers, or skipped the ordeal and shuffled, staring at the floor towards the team bus in the bowles of the Olympique Lyonnaise Stadium.
A few weeks ago the home soccer team suffered a similar humiliation against PSG and their coach was sacked after a public outcry. Watch this space on Eddie Jones.
News broke before kick off that Jones had had a job interview for the vacant Japan job. He would neither confirm nor deny that after the humbling defeat – just some line about not understanding the question when it was put to him.
The players said the uncertainty played no role in their performance.
“There was nothing to address. Eddie’s committed to us, we’re committed to Eddie,” said Arnold.
But former Wallabies flyhalf Bernard Foley, who was rejected by Jones along with Quade Cooper, weighed in with a spicy tweet that received backing from former assistant coach Laurie Fisher.
Tate McDermott and Andrew Kellaway said they were unaware of the rumours of Jones’ flirtation with Japan.
“I doubt with the amount of media on us at the moment that anyone saw that, in fact I didn’t see it, so I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about. I didn’t hear anything of it,” McDermott said.
Dejection for Australia players and staff after the Rugby World Cup France 2023 match between Wales and Australia at Parc Olympique on September 24, 2023 in Lyon, France. (Photo by Craig Mercer/MB Media/Getty Images)
To a man the players were apologetic and felt they’d let people down.
“That was obviously incredibly disappointing,” McDermott said.
“That’s a result we’re going to have to live with. We let not only the people who supported us in the crowd down from Australia, there was heaps of fans out there, I want to thank them for their support throughout this whole tournament, but everyone back home as well. What we’ve put out tonight wasn’t good enough and we’ve got to own that.”
Angus Bell was “pretty raw at the moment. How much emotion all the boys are showing – it’s a devastating day.”
To a man they backed their coach as well.
“I think you’ve got a guy with a proven track record, right. It’s not his first rodeo. He is the first person to put his hand up and say the results haven’t been good enough,” said Kellaway.
“There is a bigger picture in mind, I’m sure. A lot of these guys, in fact all of us, will be better for these experiences, which sounds like a horrible thing to say at this point, it feels strange to say that but it’s true.
“He’s a guy with a lot of experience to teach and, to be totally fair to him, he’s done a pretty good job at trying to teach those.
“As players we’ve let him down. We haven’t taken the message and we haven’t fronted up. He didn’t lose the game. He wasn’t out there last week and he wasn’t out there tonight. We have to take responsibility for that.”
(Photo by Getty Images)
Excuses will be made for the youthful team – a clear strategy by Jones to move out players he considered were dead wood and give fresh faces a chance.
“I don’t like the word young because it’s an excuse, particularly for this group. Yes, we are young. There’s a lot of young people in the squad, but to perform like that, regardless of your age when you’re in a game, as important as that for the country, like I said before, it’s not the team we want to be. We’ve got I’ve got quite a bit of work,”said McDermott.
“That’s where they’re going to learn, myself included. So the psychology thing I don’t think is an issue for us. But it’s been happening for so long that anyone in that seat is going to start feeling pressure. I’m proud of this group, but it’s very hard to kind of defend the whole team for that performance.”
McDermott said the squad remained united, although they face a miserable two weeks while their death is drawn out. If Fiji loses to Georgia and Portugal then the Aussies will win a scarcely deserved reprieve.
“Is it and we’ve got to be, there’s nowhere to run now,” McDermott said. “We’ve worked a lot on the connection piece of this group. It’s easy in the good times when you’re winning. We haven’t had many of them this year, so it’s a resilient group. But like I said before, it’s not good enough to turn out in what is a do or die game for us and perform like that.”
Kellaway also played down the experience factor.
“I don’t know if it was a lack of experience, I think we just got bashed,” said Kellaway. “At the set-piece they beat us, they out kicked us. They showed us how to manage a game. Pretty well every area of the game tonight we got beaten. You can call it what you want, we got beaten at rugby unfortunately. I don’t know if that’s an experience thing, that’s just a rugby thing.”
Young flyhalf Ben Donaldson had a difficult night – with some basic errors in his game.
He might have kicked a penalty for 10-9 before a bungled lineout led to a huge momentum shift.
“The lineout leaders and leaders thought we had good momentum and we just wanted to keep rolling and we thought if we could put seven points on at that moment we’d get some good ascendency,” said Donaldson.
“Everyone was on the same page there. We thought we were going to put ourselves in a good position to score a try. That’s rugby often things don’t go your way and it didn’t work out. Momentum was definitely lost. They went 60 metres down the other end of the field.”
“It’s very tough but with all these losses comes good learnings. You can dwell on it a little bit but we’ve got another game next week. If we don’t move on quick enough we’re not going to perform next week. When you lose you take learnings out of it and that’s what this group’s really good at. We’re upset and it was a terrible performance but we just take learnings and move forward.”