Observant Eddie Jones feels at home being England’s outsider | Simon Mundie

Growing up feeling like an odd man out in the suburbs of Sydney has shaped the career path of England’s head coach

Eddie Jones has always felt like an outsider, and still does. “An Australian coaching in England rugby,” the England rugby head coach tells me in the latest episode of Life Lessons: From Sport and Beyond. “In Japan, half-Japanese – you’re an outsider.” Born in Tasmania to a Japanese-American mother and Australian father, as a boy he lived in La Perouse, a south-eastern Sydney suburb. There were around 30 children in his school class. “Twenty-six Anglo-Saxons, three aboriginal kids and myself.”

Jones’s mother would make him take presents whenever he visited someone else’s house, a Japanese custom he found uncomfortable. “Other people could never understand why that was done. So, you were different.”