Eddie Jones: what’s wrong with a little bit of tough love in sport?
The Times has published a long sharp attack by Owen Slot on Eddie Jones, English rugby’s chief coach, and the sub gave it a fine eye-catching headline: “Blazing rows, brutal texts and airport firings – why it’s so hard to work for Eddie Jones”. This referred to his assistant coaches, but some players have, it seems, had it just as tough: “Verbal abuse, pressure, belittling” – that is how one former employee put it. “Brutal, rude, aggressive” – that was how a player saw Jones’s treatment of his assistants.
If this was a fair comment, you wonder how much respect one of these assistant coaches would command from players who heard him being abused.
Anyone who has worked in the newspaper trade has experience with, or at least knows of, editors who were formidable, ferocious and frightening. Proprietors too, of course. One thinks of the happily long-late Robert Maxwell, the report of whose death was greeted in his Empire’s newsrooms with resounding cheers and merry laughter.
We know also the justification for bullying and venomous verbal abuse. Fear keeps people on their toes. It fosters creative tension. It separates the hard men who can take it from the wimps who can’t. And someone will always come up with the Harry S Truman quote: “if you can’t stand the heat, keep out of the kitchen.” Then again, someone else is sure to say, “it may be nasty, but it works”.
Sometimes, one has to admit that it does – in the short term, at least. Stalin was ruthless with generals who didn’t measure up, Hitler -till his last months in the bunker – was surprisingly tolerant of failure. Which dictator won the war?
Results, after all, are what matters.
The trouble here is that Eddie Jones’s results are not really that good. He started very well. He took over the squad which Stuart Lancaster had built, but which had failed in the 2015 World Cup.
That failure wasn’t perhaps Lancaster’s fault; his plans were disrupted by his employers’ obsession with Sam Burgess, the very expensive recruit from Rugby League. Still, Jones inherited a lot of very good players and met with early success. Over two years (2016/2017) England played 23 matches and won 22 of them. There has been nothing to match this since, even though England reached the World Cup final in 2019.
Owen Slot offers several examples of criticism from players as well as from coaches who have fallen off the merry-go-round. Some come from players’ autobiographies. Some of these books are ghost-written, but one assumes that the nominal author reads and approves.
The former England captain Dylan Hartley, as tough a man as you could wish for, said he relished the times when he could just retreat to his room. Another unnamed player said; “you speak to the guys from Scotland, Ireland and Wales and they have such good fun. I wish we could be more like that.” “So what? the reply might be, “Test match rugby is about winning, not about having fun.”
Well, yes, but England lost to all these countries in the Spring, Wales and Ireland have both won the Six Nations in Jones’s time, while Scotland has a better record against his England teams than at any time since the years 1983-90.
The most significantly damning comment comes from another unnamed player who apparently thinks Jones likes to sap a player’s confidence: “You just end up worrying about what he’s thinking. In mid-game I find myself worrying about doing certain things or expressing myself or being able to play with freedom because I’m worried about the message I’m going to get,” he says.
That certainly doesn’t sound good, and it seems to sum up the way England have sometimes played in the Jones years.
Long long ago, well before Jones’s time, Carwyn James said: “The boring, unthinking coach continually preaches about mistakes. The creative coach expects his players to make mistakes”.
Which of these coaches sounds like Eddie Jones? Well, what did Carwyn James know? He is, after all, the only man to have coached a Lions team that won a series in New Zealand.
One may, of course, be wronging Jones. He has just appointed a new Defence Coach, Anthony Seibold, from the Australian Rugby League club Brisbane Broncos. He had been sacked by the Broncos after the worst season in the club’s history, and a tenure in which they frequently lost by 50 points or more.
Some defence! you may say. Stuart Barnes, never a wholehearted member of the Eddie Fan Club, says there isn’t another person on the rugby planet who would have come up with the former Broncos coach as part of England’s World Cup package.
If England’s defence does not stand up to scrutiny, there should be an inquiry into this appointment. “It takes,” Barnes reflects, “either a rugby genius or an almighty ego to ignore the obvious evidence..” What is England’s World Cup package?
Well, Jones has half-a-dozen Autumn internationals, two Six Nations tournaments and a couple of Summer tours to get it right. There is plenty of time to prove he really is a rugby genius and plenty of opportunities to change his coaching team again if things aren’t going right.
Sometimes when I ponder on Jones, I remember a remark made in the Telegraph office in the old days of Fleet Street when an editor of either the Daily or the Sunday was eased out. “You know,” said one colleague to another, “we’re going to miss that lunatic when he’s gone”.