‘It’s taken a fair bit out of me’: Eddie Jones opens up

Eddie Jones has defended his coaching methods and confirmed he could be tempted by a fairytale reconciliation with the Wallabies but warned it would not happen unless Australian rugby puts its house in order.

Jones is a free agent after his “dream” seven-year run with England ended prematurely this month. The 62-year-old is being courted by several Test nations, including the US, Japan and Georgia, and has opportunities in French rugby and the NRL.

He is also at the top of Hamish McLennan’s wishlist, the Rugby Australia chairman determined to repatriate the former Randwick hooker.

But Jones told the Herald he would not rush into a decision on what he does next and said it was unlikely he would coach another side at next year’s World Cup.

“Coaching at the next World Cup will be difficult,” he said from Tokyo, where he is a longstanding consultant to club side Suntory. “It probably has struck me that the last three years has taken a fair bit out of me. Three, four days after I got sacked, we had to take the dog for a rabies shot – now we have to try to get her out of the country – and I went down to the local shopping centre and I realised I probably haven’t been there for two and a half years.

“It was pretty all encompassing the last three years, so I think I’ll take a bit of a breath now. If someone comes forward and the offer’s too good to refuse then I’ll look at it, but I think it’s getting too close to the starting point of the World Cup, so I’m not too bothered one way or another.”

Jones played his cards close to his chest regarding a return to Australia, 15 years after he left these shores at a professional crossroads, confirming he was interested in “anything where I can add value”.

“That would be my starting point: whether I can add value and whether they can win. They’re the two things I’m looking at.”

Asked whether Australia was ready for a second Jones chapter, he responded: “I don’t think I’m equipped to handle that question, but [a statement that] resonates with me is when they asked [former Arsenal manager] Arsene Wenger whether he’d coach England.

“Firstly he said, ‘No I’m too young’ – when he was in his 50s – and secondly he said, ‘I’d never coach a national team because I never control the development of talent coming through’.

“Coaching at the international level is for experienced coaches because everything’s put into a small period of time and you have to try to get everything right in a small period of time, so experience helps there. Having made mistakes and learning from mistakes, you understand what to do – and it’s not to say you won’t make other mistakes.

“Secondly, you’ve got to look at ... is the country set up to maximise the development of the talent coming through? People talk about England having advantages because they’ve got a big player pool but a big player pool doesn’t give you advantages. What gives you advantages is a lot of good players.

“Ireland probably have 32 really good players and they haven’t got much outside of that, but as long as they don’t have a bad injury run – and they don’t have a bad injury run because they’ve got fantastic [strength and conditioning staff], fantastic medical [staff], fantastic collaboration between their national team and their provincial teams. It’s not perfect, if you talk to [former Brumbies and Connacht coach] Andy Friend, he’ll tell you it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to maximise the talent that they’ve got.”

Jones praised the work of Wallabies coach Dave Rennie for doing “a really good job under difficult circumstances” but said the code could not afford to keep losing top schoolboy talent, such as Angus Crichton, Cameron Murray and Joseph Suaali’i, to rugby league.

“They’re crucial, for Australia to be at their best and be a World Cup champion, you need to get those kids, who are good players at schoolboy level and rugby players, so they don’t get missed and go to rugby league,” he said.

“It’s tough because you’ve got all those NRL clubs and the competition is firing and they’ve all got money. A young kid like Crichton – I don’t know the exact details – but I believe when he came out of school, he was offered something like $40,000 to play Waratahs and be a bits-and-pieces player. He gets offered five times that by the Roosters, he’s going to start, he’s going to be in the team. It’s a hard thing for a young player to resist.

“Those challenges have always been there but they’ve probably been magnified more now by the vitality of the NRL and also by the fact Australian rugby has dropped off a bit.”

On the flipside, Jones said rugby was on the cusp of a “golden period” in Australia, with the British and Irish Lions touring here in 2025 and a World Cup at home in 2027.

He warned he could be a controversial pick as Wallabies coach, given he’d coached the team before and has spent so much time overseas.

And he defended his methods as a hard taskmaster, denying a report he’d left a young England player in tears after a brutal dressing down. He said while his coaching style had evolved with the times, it was still his job “to prepare the players for the harshest conditions in the game”.

“There’s some validity in all of that [criticism]. It’s not for everyone. I can guarantee you it’s not for everyone,” Jones said. “Having said that, I think there’s a track record that suggests that maybe some of that is exaggeration and some of it goes with a nice narrative for people to sell. You’re in a national gig for seven years and at the end of it, you’ve only got players saying good things. I haven’t heard any of the current players come out and say, ‘Shit we’re glad he’s gone’. There’s no reason for them to say nice things now because I’m not going to have any effect on their career.

“There’s the fact that I coached Japan for four years, England for seven years, that’s 11 years in international coaching. If your methods are so bad, you’re not going to do that. Let’s be completely honest about it, I can be too hard on people. But I’m less like that now. One of the things I do question is whether I was too soft in England, particularly in the last two or three years, whether I didn’t put the hammer [down] enough.”

He also revealed his proudest moments as England coach and where he thought the balance lay between winning every Test match and building towards a World Cup.

A second bite at the cherry?
Jones’ Wallabies won the 2001 Bledisloe Cup and made it to the final of the 2003 World Cup, only to have their hearts broken by Jonny Wilkinson’s famous drop goal. Two years later, the then-Australian Rugby Union sacked Jones after a poor season. He took a job at the Queensland Reds but lasted one poor season before leaving, admitting later he was desperate to show the ARU it was wrong to sack him. In 2015 he said of that time: “I didn’t divorce Australia. Australia divorced me.” Is reconciliation possible? Is it even desirable, now Jones has put that bitter split behind him and established himself as one of the best coaches in the world?

“They say, ‘Never go to the same well twice’, don’t they,” he said. “That’s always the thing you’ve got to think about. Every Super Rugby coach in Australia wants the Australian job. They’d say, ‘Why would we bring back someone from the outside when we have these people here?’. There’s always that battle going on and the only way Australia can get over that is if they get this collaborative, competitive spirit where everyone’s in it together. The main show is the Wallabies but the provinces are huge shows themselves. I think if they can work together then it can be a fantastic opportunity.”

‘If there was a class structure in rugby, England sees themselves ... as if they’re the kings of the world, that’s the reality of it.’

Eddie Jones

The “golden period” ahead for Australian rugby
“I still remember that Lions tour in 2001, what effect it had on the Australian sporting landscape, those hordes of guys in red jerseys drinking beer at 8 o’clock in the morning. People coming out of the Gabba, 80 per cent of the crowd in red jerseys. It changed the way Australians supported their team.

“Then the 2003 World Cup, I can still remember the Monday night we were drinking at the Lodge with John Howard up until about 2 o’clock in the morning and a couple of the players said, ‘We hate that this is going to end’. Even though we didn’t win, it was just a fantastic experience; with your country supporting you, your prime minister supporting you. They’re the little jewels you’d like to be part of.”

Eddie Jones “too soft” on England?
“All the good players want to be better and to get them better you’ve got to generally challenge players. You can challenge them in a number of ways. Twenty years ago you used to play more mind games, you used to be more forceful in the way you spoke to players. I think I’m smart enough to know you can’t do that now and there’s different methods to how you do it. You’ve got to do it in a much more collaborative way, speaking to the players, guiding them. But you’ve still got to get the best out of them.

“The only regret I’d ever have as a coach is if I didn’t feel like I worked hard enough to get the best out of the players, because as a coach you’re a servant to the players and your job is to get the best out of them.”

England player “reduced to tears” during 2022 Six Nations campaign
The Times reported that England newcomer Max Malins was “eviscerated” by Jones for his body language around training and reduced to tears. Jones said “someone’s got a vivid imagination”.

“I’ve had plenty of players in tears, but not because of what I’ve done, it’s sometimes because of what they’ve done. I think tears now for men are much more common than they were 20 years ago. I can’t remember the situation at all.”

Changing expectations around workplace culture and behaviour
“Society has changed enormously, but what hasn’t changed is what the game requires of you. The game requires you to be tough, it requires you to be courageous, it requires you to be a good teammate. Those factors haven’t changed, in fact they’ve probably been exacerbated by the law changes of how physically challenging rugby is.

“It doesn’t matter what happens in society, you’ve still got to prepare the players for the harshest conditions in the game. You just have to do it in a different way now.”

Proudest moments as England coach
“Probably doing seven years there,” he joked. “Fancy an Australian from Matraville [coaching England]. When we played rugby with the Ellas, we used to go and pick up the stones off the ground before we played because they couldn’t afford to put proper topping on. If there was a class structure in rugby, England sees themselves, portrays themselves and acts like, they’re the kings of the world. That’s the reality of it. To have the opportunity to coach England for seven years and be successful, is like a dream. That whole period is like a dream.

“But particularly the one game, that 2019 [World Cup] semi-final [England beat reigning World Cup champions the All Blacks 19-7]. As an Australian, the only thing you want to do in rugby is beat New Zealand ... and when you do that on the biggest stage, against a good New Zealand team – they’d beaten Ireland by 40 points in the quarter-final – there wasn’t any luck involved in that win. We dominated them from go to woah.

“We weren’t quite good enough to win it. And then to continue after that, that was a difficult decision for me. I knew it was going to be tough. Then there was a couple of things that happened that you can’t control. I look back and reckon I can look back for the last three years and say, ‘I’ve coached all right, I’ve coached pretty well’. Not perfect. And I still reckon England were in a position to win the World Cup, but who knows now, that’s not my worry now.”

“Too focused on the World Cup”
Jones coached England to three Six Nations titles, a World Cup final, and finished with the highest win rate of any England coach (73 per cent). But he was sacked after the side’s poorest season in 14 years and RFU boss Bill Sweeney said this week that the board lost faith that Jones could improve the team in time for the World Cup. Sweeney also questioned whether he put too much emphasis on the four-year cycle instead of winning matches.

“I’ve got no comment on what anyone said,” Jones said. “Everyone’s clever, they all know how to coach, they all know how to do it, so I don’t have any comment on smart people. They’re smarter than me.

On the subject of what should take priority – Test wins or the World Cup “cycle”, he said: “It’s always a balancing act and I think it depends on where your team is in its cycle. I don’t think there’s an exact science about it. Sometimes you’re going through a rebuilding period and your focus needs to be on the World Cup to get the team right. The other thing is, you look at the World Cup in soccer. The only team anyone will remember is Argentina. It’s all about Argentina and it’s the biggest prize in the world. In some ways, there’s a process going on but in other ways I think, why wouldn’t you be concentrating on the biggest prize in the world?”

New England coach Steve Borthwick
“He’ll be fantastic,” Jones said. “We coached together for nine years. I brought him into coaching with Japan and he’s a fantastic assistant coach. One of the things I look back with pride on was that one of my jobs was to create the next England coach, so I’ve done that. The difficult thing for him is he’s still quite young. He’s 41. But he’s quite mature. The test will be when the pressure gets on, when the media starts coming at him, maybe the support at the top starts to waver a little bit. How he can hold his nerve. But he’s a good man.“

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