Remember that night in Paris? This same March week in 2016, Eddie Jones’s England went there with the grand slam on the line. Of course they won it, beating France 31-21 thanks to fine tries from Danny Care, Dan Cole and Anthony Watson. Afterwards, James Haskell and Chris Robshaw were walking around the Stade de France in custom-made shirts with the number six-and-a-half on the back (a sly and affectionate dig at their coach after he told them they couldn’t play seven), while the Vunipola brothers belted out Backstreet Boys covers in the dressing room. It was the start of a party that stretched long into the next morning.
Looking back, it is still the happiest night the team have had since Jones took over. In that first year or so, he approached England’s rugby like a breeze blowing away fog. His ruthlessness made for a stark contrast with the muddled thinking his predecessor, Stuart Lancaster, had got bogged down in during the last year of his tenure as head coach.
Lancaster and his assistant coaches were still trying to figure out who was in their best XV after they had been knocked out of the 2015 World Cup. They were going back and forth over who should start at fly-half and in the midfield for that last, dead pool game against Uruguay.
Jones thought George Ford was his best fly-half so picked him there. He wanted Owen Farrell in his team, too, so he put him at centre. He didn’t believe Robshaw was the right man to play on the open-side so he moved him and brought back Haskell. He didn’t think Robshaw was the right man to be captain either; he wanted what he called a bit more “mongrel”, so recalled Dylan Hartley.
He had clear ideas about the team’s style of play and strategy. He wanted what he called a traditionally English approach, with an emphasis on a strong set piece. He stopped England from worrying about anything apart from winning the next game.
Jones had the knack of making a complicated game simple. Read back his assessment of Lancaster’s mistakes in one of his last columns for the Daily Mail: “They went away from what they had practised for most of the year and that breeds confusion amongst the players. If you don’t have clarity, you have a problem.
“Yes, they had an injury to Jonathan Joseph but they should have had someone similar to fill his shoes. You need a second-string guy who can play the same way, without having to change the direction of the whole team. They switched it all around again at half-time against Australia and everything just looked a little bit confused.”
It was crisp, clear and grounded in simple principles. You wonder what that Eddie Jones would make of this Eddie Jones and what would he say about England now if he still had that column in the Mail.
Would he ask why the captaincy is being passed around between Tom Curry, Courtney Lawes and Farrell when the man who sets the standards, Maro Itoje, is frozen out because he may or may not be too “inward-looking” to do it (it depends if you go on Jones’s last book or what he said about it afterwards)? Would he ask why if England’s forwards played so well against Ireland when Itoje and Lawes were packing down together at lock England don’t play them there every week?
Would he wonder why, if England still want to build a midfield around the mighty Manu Tuilagi when he is fit, they’ve also been picking the radically different midfield pairing of Henry Slade and Elliot Daly when he’s not? Would he look through all the players who have been discarded over the years because they had the wrong attitude and decide that two or three or four or more of them (Billy Vunipola, say, or Ollie Lawrence) could, just like Hartley and Haskell, still do a job if the coach only had a different approach to his man-management?
Would he question why Max Malins has been binned from this last match against France after playing every minute of the tournament? Would he look at this England team and wonder what style of rugby they are supposed to be playing? Would he ask what their defining characteristics are? Would he wonder why, after finishing fifth in the Six Nations last year and getting stuck in mid-table again this, England seem to have moved so far away from that first principle of winning the next game and why there is so much talk about work in progress and what they’ll be doing this time next year?
Jones would say the decisions he made then, and the way he had the team playing in that first year, were the product of a particular time and place, when he was fresh to the job and the players were driven by the need to make amends for their awful performance in the World Cup. Last year he decided many of the players who got to the World Cup final in 2019 had lost that drive and he needed to rebuild the team, work he’s still at. But it’s beginning to feel like England are living on the promise of what they’ll do tomorrow. Or the year after. Supporting them has become a question of faith that they’ll come right when it counts most.
“I have always seen trust as a bank where you make deposits and withdrawals,” Jones has said. “You’ve got to avoid making too many withdrawals and concentrate on building your deposits.”
He has drawn a lot in the past few weeks. There’s still credit there. They paid some back against Ireland last Saturday. But they still lost and he, and his team, could sure use another top-up in Paris on Saturday.
