The Eddie Jones I know

Eddie Jones once offered to buy me a drink on Valentine’s Day. I declined; it was early in the evening, and I needed to get home.

It wasn’t an intimate setting, in case you were wondering. A group of us rugby journalists had popped into a pub in Kensington, opposite the hotel where Jones and the England team were staying, for a quick chat about the day, and Jones had come in to meet his assistant coaches who were sitting at the other end of the room.

“Would you boys like a beer,” he said to us, and a couple accepted. He brought the drinks over and made a friendly remark and moved on with his own glass of red, which we knew to be his favourite tipple.

With off-duty Eddie – or a version of off-duty – it was possible to feel convivial. At other times, he could cut you dead.

Jones is a topic of discussion again now, nearly two years since he was sacked by England amid the turmoil of a losing team, as he is in charge of Japan, who play at Twickenham this Sunday.

They are a young side who are losing big to the main nations. In 2023 Jones was controversially made head coach of Australia for a second time, and they lost big too.

There have also been stinging accusations made by Danny Care, the former England scrum-half, in his recent autobiography, of Jones’s bullying culture as a coach, albeit alongside an acknowledgement that the Australian’s skills were up with the best and, initially with England, he achieved superb results.

I wouldn’t say I know Eddie well, but I’ve had enough interaction to offer an opinion. It started when he pitched up at Saracens in 2008, initially advising, then sliding into the head coach’s role.

Fairly quickly, the London club’s owner Nigel Wray decided on a different approach under Brendan Venter, the South African coach/doctor.

In Jones’s short time, he came across as an intense fish out of water in conservative English club rugby. I was working mostly for a Sunday newspaper, and Saracens mostly played on Sundays, so I didn’t see a lot of him.

But I kept his number and he was a valuable and willing contact leading up to the huge event that was the 2015 World Cup staged in England. He was head coach of Japan (first time around) and had 20 years of coaching clubs, Super Rugby and his own national team behind him.

He took calls with a neutral “hello, mate” and held forth, once naming four England backs and a No 8 as having “a lack of work ethic off the ball”, and praising Brad Barritt as an exception. Sometimes I’d ask where he was, and he’d say “Tokyo, mate” and I’d check my watch. But he was already known as a workaholic, open all hours.

As the horrible exit of Stuart Lancaster’s England from that World Cup played out, Jones was happy to be quoted in detail on why they needed an experienced foreign coach.

It turned out that was the choice England made, with Jones, and for the next few years he made more back-page news than the rest of his sport put together.

In a business in which profile and success and cock-ups are currency, Jones was the governor of the bank of England rugby stories.

Former colleagues of Jones’s told me about him “riding” – an Aussie term for getting on someone’s case – players, and emailing assistant coaches at 4am and expecting an answer.

In set-piece press conferences, Jones gave us amusing comment, coaching insight, braggadocio and plain bad taste – referencing Johnny Sexton’s parents in connection with the Ireland fly-half’s concussion springs to mind.

I felt in his keenness to play the media game, maybe even to be helpfully promoting, he reached too much to be the all-knowing guru. It was interesting to think why that might be.

But his peers among those newly bracketed as “super-coaches” between the 2015 and 2019 World Cups – Warren Gatland, Steve Hansen, Michael Cheika, etc – were more likely to stick to stuff that affected them directly.

For a while we continued to exchange the odd text, from something as simple as mutually praising a great cover tackle in a match not involving him to a broad hint that Manu Tuilagi was coming straight back into the England team after an injury.

It was nothing like special treatment; others were in touch with Jones more often. He wrote two books while he was England coach. You could chat to him at club matches or, during the isolation of the pandemic, I remember him giving a thumbs-up from a corner of Harlequins’ empty ground to my clumsy mime of a bit of skill by Marcus Smith.

On one occasion I was seeking information on some disciplinary matter, and Jones texted sharply back “you like an argument”, and I had to decide whether it was meant humorously or critically.

You could see how a player or colleague might be unsure and perturbed in the much more important and impactful environment of working together for England.

With media present at training, Jones would bawl “work harder” to certain players, he made first-half substitutions of uncommon savagery, and testimony accumulated – particularly in The Times which put in a lot of good background work – of coaches and players driven to tears or quitting or both. Others praised and liked him.

Now, in 2024, the concept of the “super-coach” has faded a little, and certainly Jones’s aura has too. You can’t make an omelette without breaking an egg, the saying goes, but his reputation is scrambled, irretrievably some would say, although Japan and the Barbarians have kept hiring him.

I’d say a decent idea would have been for Jones to move on from England after reaching the 2019 World Cup final and, even more logically, the RFU had a plan for him to go in 2021.

But his attempt at being jokey about Wales and Ireland in a business seminar helped scupper his chance of coaching the Lions – and that, for Jones himself, was a crying shame.