Surely you would not sack the most successful coach you’ve had without a clear vision. So what is the RFU’s grand plan?Eight minutes to play and England are 14 points down against New Zealand. Will Stuart has just scored in the corner and Marcus Smith is standing over the conversion, on the 22, five metres in from the right touchline. It should be Owen Farrell’s kick.Farrell, who has made every shot at goal so far in the autumn, 15 out of 15 in 200 minutes of Test rugby, is on the pitch, but struggling with a dead leg. So it falls to Smith. He strides up, leans back a touch too much as he swings his boot through and the...
The fiercely Australian coach is suddenly a free agent with an axe to grind and a World Cup plan – and the Wallabies need a wildcard to win big in 2023In sacking Eddie Jones as head coach nine months out from the World Cup, English rugby may have gift-wrapped an early Christmas present for the woebegone Wallabies in 2023. The fiercely Australian Jones is suddenly a free agent with an axe to grind and a World Cup plan. That makes him a very dangerous adversary to his old masters, and a huge – if slightly volatile – weapon of mass destruction should the men in gold snap him up as a gun-for-hire.Rugby Australia has backed its coach, Dave Rennie, through...
Australia claimed two scalps and climbed the world rankings but most important of all it was a win for Generation NextThe Wallabies fell short in lots of ways on their spring tour. They tasted defeat in three Tests and were lucky not to lose a fourth. They finished the international season with only five victories and nine losses and never won back-to-back. The injury toll was horrendous: 40 Wallabies battered or broken. And they are still no closer to locking in a 9-10 playmaking dynamic to spark their erratic attack.And yet, this year they defeated England, South Africa, Argentina, Scotland and Wales and went within a whisker of vanquishing France, Ireland and New Zealand, the top three sides in the...
Talk of firing the coach nine months out from a World Cup ignores the very traits that make him worth sticking byThere have been a few good Eddie Jones stories going round the grounds lately. Joe Simpson told one the other day about the time Jones gave a steak to one of his assistant coaches as an apology for shouting at him. When the coach got home he found out it was a bag of sausages. “You’re not ready for steak yet,” Jones told him.Here’s another, a little different to some of the others. In 2019, Jones read a Guardian article about an England fan who had travelled to watch the team play in Japan while he was sick with...
There was no thrilling Twickenham comeback this time as savvy Springboks come out on top in attritional battleAll the talk before the match was about what a tough Test this would be, England’s players and coaches spoke about how they wanted to “front up”, “take them on physically”, and “match them up front”, as the assistant coach Richard Cockerill put it: “You know what’s coming with the Springboks.” All of which was true enough. It was a nasty Test, played on a nasty evening, when winter seemed to have come rushing in all of a sudden on a stiff, swirling wind, and with a lick of drizzle. It was a game of scrums, thumps, slips, smashes, and penalties, played under...