In Eddie Jones’s first five months of his homecoming as head coach of Australia, he has already achieved one of the desired effects.
“Eddie has brought rugby back onto the front and back pages,” Tim Horan, the great former Wallaby centre and now respected TV pundit, tells i.
“It’s very difficult here in Australia – the first seven pages of sport in a newspaper is rugby league, then the next two pages are Aussie Rules and, if you’re lucky, the eighth page is funerals and death notices and you might get half a page of that with rugby. People have stood up and gone ‘wow, Eddie Jones is back to make a change’.
“The [New South Wales] Waratahs had a Super Rugby game in Sydney in March with about 20,000 people there and the camera went on Eddie sitting in the stand taking notes, and the crowd gave the biggest cheer of the night to him rather than the Waratahs scoring a try. I asked him about it a couple of weeks ago and said ‘that must be a bit of a buzz?’, and he said ‘well, they all like me at the moment because I haven’t lost a game’.”
And that’s part two of the big challenge for Jones: getting the national side, the Wallabies, ready for the World Cup in France in September, in his second stint in the job, 18 years after he was sacked from the first, and with a sacking by England last December as the trigger for rushing through his re-hiring in place Dave Rennie.
Jones has described it as a “smash and grab”, saying: “Nobody expects us to win the World Cup so we have got to be the best thieves in the world – well planned, audacious, smart, and plenty of spirit. We want to be the Pink Panthers in gold jerseys.”
The eponymous “Pink Panther” in the movies was, of course, the diamond being stolen, not the thief – but with Jones the impact of the hype and the underlying messaging is always the key.
Horan has done his bit, revealing to i he was in a group of Classic Wallabies invited by Jones into the current squad’s first training camp on the Gold Coast last month. Horan says: “He had Chris Latham, George Smith, George Gregan, myself, Morgan Turinui, Justin Harrison and we had a chat to the leadership group about our experience of Rugby World Cups.
“Then we had dinner with the players in different groups – me with the outside backs and so on. The theme was the players understanding the history that’s gone before them, and then go and create your own history.”
The long game laid out by the Rugby Australia chairman Hamish McLennan in mid-January was for Jones to see Australia through an exciting period of this World Cup and the one they are hosting in 2027, and the lucrative visit of the British & Irish Lions in between.
Having turned round a parlous financial position, McLennan is engaged in a “code war” with rugby league, with Jones as a happy lieutenant in the spectacular signing of Joseph Sua’ali’i, the 19-year-old from NRL club Sydney Roosters, from October of 2024.
Short term, Australia’s first Test under Jones will be with South Africa in Pretoria on 8 July, and he has already ruled out altitude as an excuse. After the Rugby Championship there are World Cup warm-ups including France in Paris in August.
The World Cup proper in September pits Australia with Wales, Fiji, Georgia and Portugal, and the second-placed team will face England in the quarter-finals, if England win their pool, or vice versa. The other possible meeting is in the final. “If we happen to meet England, well and good,” Jones said in January. “I might have a conversation with some of the players and not with the administration.”
The change from Jones’s miserable last days with England is the enthusiasm in his voice at press conferences – one was at his old school, Matraville, with the Ella Brothers – and on his weekly podcast “Eddie” that ran for 11 episodes before life got too busy.
Jones’s long-time media advisor David Pembroke tells i the pod reached listeners in 82 countries including Myanmar, Bolivia and Barbados. He has been cautioning rugby not to be “too driven by technology”, and rating Johnny Sexton as “a real difference between Ireland being very strong and Ireland being average.”
The Wallabies were beset by injuries last year, and winning below 40 per cent, and Jones has demanded they become the world’s “hardest workers”, saying: “In Australian sport, we are always at our best when we are aggressive, taking the game to the opposition.”
Horan says: “Being at that Wallaby camp, it went for two or three days, seeing the pressure he put on some players, the mind games that he has, the jokes that he has with players – at the moment, players don’t really know how to take Eddie. They know there’s going to be a lot of commitment, accountability and discipline the players will need to put in place. I don’t think they really know how fit they’re going to be and how much he’s going to drive them.”
The coaching staff completed by Jones this month includes several familiar from roles in the UK: the attack coach Brad Davis, defence coach Brett Hodgson, forwards coordinator Neal Hatley, strength and conditioning coaches Jon Clarke and Nigel Ashley-Jones.
Then there is Berrick Barnes, nominally a kicking consultant, but who Horan says will “have an influence on the attacking structure and physicality”. Hodgson is from rugby league, whose coaches, says Jones, “see the detail” in phase play more than their union counterparts. Former attack coach Scott Wisemantel was ruled out by family reasons, but Jones recently spent two hours catching up with him.
La Rochelle lock Will Skelton and other possible Wallabies based in Europe have been summoned by Jones to middle-of-the-night Zoom calls. “The calls were good to be a part of,” Skelton says. “It’s refreshing to have a new coach come in and bring in his way of playing, which the boys have to buy into. It’s a short five months we’ve got and hopefully I’m involved. There are guys on the ground in Super Rugby who are working hard to put their hand up.”
The Super Rugby bounce so far is so-so, with the Brumbies, Waratahs, Reds and Rebels standing third, sixth, seventh and 11th in the 12-team competition, with 23 wins from 48 matches.
Horan says: “When they signed Eddie, I said it’s a risk, but a risk that is well worth taking, in the position where the Wallabies and rugby sit at the moment in Australia. In the last three or four years rugby has struggled because of how we performed in Rugby World Cup 2019, how we lost to England in a three-Test series last year, and rugby league and AFL has got a springboard in those couple of years, so the gap has widened.
“We’ve got this runway now of the Lions coming in 2025, World Cup hosting in ’27 and Eddie Jones going all the way through, so there’s a pretty broad opportunity for the brand of rugby down under and he’s going to be a very big part of that.
“We forget how young he was in 2003 [when he coached Australia to the final]. He was 43 and that’s a very young coach. So he’s had another 20 years’ experience since 2003, around different sides in three more World Cups, so it gives us hope. Although sometimes it’s the hope that kills you.”
This week, Jones will return to London to coach the Barbarians, bringing with him Quade Cooper and Samu Kerevi, two top Wallabies denied to the unlucky Rennie by injury. Jones has heard his England successor and former colleague Steve Borthwick comprehensively rubbish what he inherited.
Jones did not disagree, and after England’s loss to Scotland in February, he said: “There is probably a bit more pain to go. And he [Borthwick] can keep blaming me, I have got a strong back and shoulders.” The rest of us will hear from Jones on Wednesday. We can expect him to be on the front foot.
