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Eddie Jones appears to love the spotlight and he’s feeling its full glare on Monday in the wake of Australia’s embarrassing defeat to Wales that leaves the Wallabies’ exit from the World Cup a foregone conclusion.
The record 40-6 defeat – Australia’s worst ever losing margin at a World Cup – will see the Wallabies fail to qualify from the pool phase for the first time ever.
The reaction, back home in Australia and abroad, has been fierce.
World Cup winner and Stan Sport pundit Sonny Bill Williams was astonished by reports that Jones had interviewed to coach Japan – despite having a contract through to the end of the 2027 World Cup. While that move might be prudent on what’s been termed Australian rugby’s “darkest day” – it happened before Jones even arrived at the Cup.
“As a player, if a coach shows his characteristics and does things like that, I’m not going to follow him into battle,” Williams said on Stan Sport.
“I’ve got to be prepared to die for a coach, and go out there and give my heart and soul.
“If someone is doing that – and the narrative that he’s saying is about the jersey, about the next four years – that’s how I feel.”
Williams said the performance of the players showed the team had lost faith in their coach.
“That second half – that looked like a team that just lost belief, and that starts from the head (coach) in the sheds, the guy that’s telling them to get up,’ Williams said.
(Photo by Adam Pretty – World Rugby/World Rugby via Getty Images)
“I feel for these boys, I feel for the fans. I’m going to keep it real here, they were up against it from the start.
“Where we are right now, questions need to be asked, from selections to the mind games Eddie’s been playing with these kids, these young men.
“The proof is in the pudding, 40-6 is really embarrassing, and I feel for these kids, they’re going to carry this on for the rest of their careers and feel this.”
Former Waratahs and Scotland coach Matt Williams, speaking on Virgin Media, said: “That’s the worst Australian performance in my life.
“We just box-kicked, there was no attack, no shape. We’ve lost the ‘how’. How do Australia play?
“Everyone is going to blame Eddie [Jones] but we’ve lost our ‘why’.
“Why does that gold jersey mean more to Australian sport than anything except perhaps the baggy green cap of the cricket team?
“That jersey unites Australia. It means so much to the country. So many people would strive and give anything to wear that jersey.
“It’s a really, really dark day for Australian rugby.”
Williams said the players’ body language “was really upsetting. There was no fight.
“Where was the aggression? Where were the leaders?
“They might not be great players, but there was no dog in them. Where is the dog in that team?”
Former Wallabies star David Campese told Planet Rugby he was “absolutely devastated but unsurprised we find ourselves in this position.
“This match now means a total reset of the sport in Australia. We cannot continue with a coach that thinks he’s bigger and more important than the guys that are trying to deliver. We cannot allow selections to be based upon compliance, we need people with balls to shape and own the game on the pitch, not to deliver an old man’s vision of archaic bland rugby structures.
“Most of all, we need to remember what our rugby DNA is – skilled, pacy, unpredictable, intelligent – the complete opposite of the structured snorefest we saw today.
“Mark my words, this is one of the darkest days in Wallaby history and it is now time for a complete overhaul of Rugby Australia, its governance and its coaching staff. It really is that big.”
The British media, who had their own frequent squabbles with Jones over a seven year stint with England, were also scathing of his coaching and machinations, and the team he put on the field.
“Lyon represented a new low for Australian rugby union. In the tenth World Cup the Wallabies were finally all but eliminated at the pool stage. It was quite a record, for a country where rugby union has long played back-up to rugby league and Aussie rules football,” wrote Stuart Barnes in The Times.
“Eddie Jones’s team came into the Test with six losses in seven matches, bruised egos and battered confidence, not to mention rumours of the head coach’s clandestine negotiations with Japan. Australia were at an all-time World Cup low before kick-off. They tumbled into the world of the abject.”
Oliver Brown, writing in Telegraph, took great glee in Jones’s woes.
“Out of touch, out of luck, out of time. Eddie Jones has been a roguish constant in Test rugby for over 20 years, turning himself into a one-man vaudeville act with his lethal tongue and rapier wit. Except nobody is laughing any longer, least of all Australia,” wrote Brown.
“The 63-year-old sweet-talked his way back into the Wallabies job on the pretext that his country needed his Solomonic wisdom to succeed. Eight months later, he has guided this team only to rank humiliation, with a first World Cup pool-stage exit in their history on the cards. Belatedly, his compatriots think they have been duped by someone who has talked a far better game than he has delivered.
“It is unconscionable that Jones carries on. Forget all the flannel that he could yet turn Australia into world-beaters in 2027. In eight Test matches he has contrived only to beat Georgia, with that miserable sequence reaching its most vivid expression with this capitulation to a Wales side who could scarcely believe the flimsy resistance. “We’ll beat Wales,” he had declared, with an impish smile. Who was he kidding? In taking this job straight after his sacking by the Rugby Football Union, this diminutive dictator has been trading on nothing more than blind faith.
“Australian supporters had seen enough, leaving in droves before the end. The spectacle should have sent quite the message to McLennan, more powerful even than the boos that greeted the announcement of Jones’ name at kick-off. The plan was that Jones could raise the Wallabies’ profile, giving them precious exposure through his press conferences. But the only headlines he has brought are of the embarrassing kind, culminating in this truly abject surrender.”
Gerald Meagher, writing in the Guardian, reflected on Australia’s previous coach – sacked at the start of a bizarre year in Australian rugby.
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)
“Penny for the thoughts of Dave Rennie,” he wrote “The former Australia head coach, who was unceremoniously ditched to make room for the Eddie Jones circus, has largely kept his counsel ever since but his views on precisely what to make of this desperately low ebb that the Wallabies have reached would be mandatory listening.
“The manner in which Rennie was pushed aside never sat well and you cannot help but see this as comeuppance for Rugby Australia. The second coming of Jones has been an inglorious failure and it will only deepen the wounds for the 63-year-old that it was his old sparring partner Warren Gatland to hammer home the extent of it. By the end of this humiliation, the Wallabies had long since thrown in the towel, Wales playing out a glorified training session.
“The only previous time Jones has failed to make it out of the pool stage at a World Cup was in 2015, when he was Japan’s head coach. It was a tournament that changed the course of his career and you wonder if history will repeat itself eight years on.
“It has been one train wreck after another since Jones’s return and during the warm-up you wondered if it had finally got to him. Twenty minutes before kick-off and there was Jones, out on the pitch, hands in pockets, a little hunched over, looking a little lost.”
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.