It says plenty for the dire state of Australian rugby that Eddie Jones’s recommitment to the Wallabies cause for 2024-27 will be welcomed by the game’s administrators as good news. In the nine months since Jones has been national coach, he has won two of nine Tests, overseen the ignominy of a failure to reach the World Cup final-eight for the first time in 10 tournaments, and reduced a code already trailing NRL, AFL and football to a smoking ruin.
Yet he remains rugby’s most recognisable figure and best hope of reclaiming its glory days.
As rugby fans bask in the glow of four brilliant, breathtaking World Cup quarter-finals over the weekend, Wallabies faithful are licking their wounds at home, on the low road to god knows where and entrusting their futures to a coach whose only regret is asking journalists to “give yourself uppercuts”. At Tuesday’s press call, Jones was at his blithe best/worst – denying reports he interviewed for a job as coach of Japan, deflecting criticism of his coaching methods to call for alignment in the game’s grass roots and elite levels, and asking for belief in his vision.
“I’ve got the foresight to see where we need to go and I’ve had the experience of being in difficult positions before,” Jones said with trademark chutzpah. “This is not an unusual position: we’ve got a team that’s been struggling and, underneath it, a system that’s not supporting it. At some stage you bottom out. This is the opportunity to change, pick younger players with bright futures while looking at the development system underneath.”
It was classic Jones – backing himself to the hilt and challenging his bosses to double-down and do likewise. When Rugby Australia trumpeted the $5m return of its prodigal son in January, chairman Hamish McLennan boasted that “Eddie instinctively understands the Australian way of playing rugby” and predicted that his “deep understanding of our rugby system and knowledge of our player group and pathways will lift the team to the next level”.
RA’s words quickly rang hollow. The fabled “Wallaby Way” of enterprising running rugby was scarcely sighted in the World Cup lead-up as Jones’s sides fumbled their way to five straight losses, a winless Rugby Championship and a 2-0 blackout in the Bledisloe Cup. These ugly, often insipid defeats, with much the same personnel predecessor Dave Rennie, led to series victories against France and South Africa in 2021, were indeed next level – but in descent.
Not only were Australia outplayed in all departments, Jones, with his bizarre rookie staff of ex-NRL and AFL lackeys, was out-coached by his rivals. On-field Australia looked rudderless and ill-disciplined, incapable of applying simple tactics and executing them with basic skills. Off field, Jones mirrored that unprofessionalism. He was fractious, cryptic and rambling with media as he preached the delusion of a “smash-and-grab” mission on rugby’s greatest prize.
When Jones cruelly axed captain Michael Hooper and senior playmaker Quade Cooper for a World Cup squad built around youthful promise, he scorched the earth to spark fresh growth, igniting a long shot bust-to-boom cycle he promised would fruit at the 2027 World Cup in Australia. To do it he sent 33 lambs to the slaughter, consigning young players to historic defeats by Fiji and Wales and humiliation on a global stage, while delivering Wallabies fans a fresh hell.
“A lot of young players are going to benefit from that experience at the 2027 World Cup,” Jones told us on Tuesday. Perhaps, but for others – both players and fans – the scars of 2023 may never heal. Despite a dream draw pitting them against none of the six top-ranked nations, the Wallabies capitulated in the pool stages. It left rugby, already the sickly runt of Australia’s major football codes, waiting another four years for a payoff that may never come.
Arguably Australian rugby’s greatest triumph of the last decade was the women’s sevens side beating New Zealand to claim gold at the 2016 Olympics. Yet despite the rise of the AFLW and NRLW at home, the payoff for Australia’s women’s rugby players – underfunded and still semi-professional – may be even more prolonged and painful than that facing the men, despite RA also securing hosting rights for the 2029 Women’s World Cup in Australia.
This latter quest also falls under Jones’s five-year job remit, RA having anointed him in a “world-first” as dual overseer of men’s and women’s programs. Yet Jones has barely paid the Wallaroos’ push toward professionalism a flicker of interest. He described the women’s side as a “secondary issue” in August and told the Guardian this week he has no intention of flying to New Zealand to watch their WXV Tests this month. “I’ve got enough to worry about.”
That much is true. “It’s not as simple as ‘the Wallabies are bad’,” he said this week, “but the Wallabies are not where they need to be. We need to fix the system to go forward. Do that and we’ve got a rosy future.”
As Jones and RA await the result of an independent review on the 2023 World Cup debacle, fans must take solace Jones is not jumping off the sinking ship while stifling a fear that he’s skippering a ship of fools heading into dark and uncharted waters
