It has taken a while to trickle out but the full and frank verdict of the players is finally in. “It was like living in a dictatorship,” writes Danny Care in his new autobiography, Everything Happens for a Reason, serialised in the Sunday Times.
“Remember what it felt like when someone was being bullied at school and you were just glad it wasn’t you? That was the vibe.”
The England regime to which he was referring – shock, horror – was that of Eddie Jones. According to Care, Jones’s players felt “like characters in a dystopian novel” at times. “Everything’s a test,” they would whisper to each other, trying to steel themselves for whatever was about to follow.
“Did Eddie rule by fear?” asks Care rhetorically, at one point. “Of course he did, everyone was bloody terrified of him.”
If all this sounds more like a now-disgraced boarding school in the 1970s than a professional sporting environment that’s often how it seems to have felt to those at the sharp end. Which raises any number of questions before Saturday’s England game against Australia, who are coincidentally also still recovering from a dose of Jones’s own-brand medicine after failing to make the knockout phase at last year’s World Cup. The most important being how and why it took so long for those inside the camp to tell it like it was.
No contracted player with an ounce of political nous, clearly, is going to criticise his current head coach in public. Speak your mind and, generally, the exit door is just over there. But what about Jones’s employers? Those in high-level positions within the Rugby Football Union who were aware of the truth but glossed over it in the name of corporate fence-sitting should be hanging their heads in shame. The governing body, however, claims it received no formal complaints about Jones.
“Some of [the analysts] ended up as shells of their former selves,” writes Care. It is a scandal and makes the judgment of those who extended Jones’s contract in 2020 (before finally sacking him in December 2022) all the more questionable.
Hold on a moment, though. Care, who played 101 Tests for England and is widely regarded as a decent, approachable sort, has also been delivering his verdict on the mood under Stuart Lancaster in the months leading up to the 2015 Rugby World Cup, when England became the first host nation to bomb out in the pool stages.
Care liked Lancaster, with whom he went back years, but his professional assessment now is wince-inducing. “The Stuart Lancaster regime was supposed to be about the fine details and leaving no stone unturned, but it had got so many big things wrong.”
He talks about the squad constantly feeling “like they were being judged” and of the visible strain on the man in charge. “The players knew we were in trouble just by seeing the toll the responsibility was taking on him. He looked like a ghost, as if all the life had been sucked out of him.”
The moral of the story? Top-level team sport can be as mentally toxic a workplace as any. You may be representing millions of people whenever you pull on the national shirt but, ultimately, one individual has a non-negotiable hold over you. If Care’s testimony is to be believed, the players often struggled to relate to either Lancaster or Jones and spent as much time rolling their eyes as they did applauding their leaders’ tactical and technical insight. Only in private, though. Speak out and you risk depriving yourself and your family of thousands of pounds in lost income.
The flip side of it all is that players who are not getting picked are famously never happy. They go and moan over a sappuccino in their local cafe, just like anybody else. The illusion of a perfectly harmonious squad tends to be exactly that. Care did protest to Jones when he was dropped in 2018 and ended up not playing for England for another four years. Which makes it harder to argue that the scrum-half’s complaints would have been even more valid if they had been made while he was still a serving England player rather than to help flog his autobiography.
But at least his testimony is out there now. And people wonder why English rugby never seems to add up to the sum of its parts. Jones, as it happens, is in France this week with Japan and will presumably have something to say in response when he feels the time is right. There is already a line in his own autobiography, however, which springs to mind at this juncture.
“My observation was that when a group of Englishmen get together they’ll often behave like they’re back in school,” wrote Jones. “The Japanese and English are very similar in that there is always a facade of politeness to their interactions. But there is no doubt that, beneath the surface, the English and the Japanese both like to bitch about everyone around them.”
One person’s truth can be someone else’s wishful thinking. “The English in general, not just in sport, want to be told what to do,” added Jones, never one to sidestep a cultural stereotype. “They like clear instruction.” Care’s view would seem to suggest the exact opposite. But surely we can all agree that players, regardless of nationality, creed or colour, deserve to be treated with fairness, courtesy and respect. The days of coaches who believe otherwise are long gone.
• This is an extract taken from our weekly rugby union email, the Breakdown. To sign up, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
