Eddie Jones

Obsessed with winning the World Cup, Eddie Jones failed to change and it cost him his job. It wasn’t his fault, it was everyone else’s. After trying to prove points, he rediscovered his love for coaching with South Africa, which led to Japan, England, and another World Cup final. He may have lost, but he’s not done. He wants to create the greatest team in the world. And then? He’s off to Hawaii. 

It could perhaps only happen in Japan. In countries across the world fines are being issued and arrests made as police and Governments get heavy handed with unruly citizens insistent on maintaining sub-2m distancing rights. 

But, in Japan, they’re relying on the politeness of society. You can still have coffee at your favourite spot, pop out for lunch and dinner, and even go out for a beer [or sake], albeit with some places shutting up shop earlier than usual. 

A polite request for restraint – coupled with a technical state of emergency – has been the key strategy in the country’s battle with COVID-19. Dealing with ‘Lockdown lite’ (as abc.net called it) right now is one of the country’s favourite sons, Eddie Jones. “By law they can’t lock down the country,” explains Eddie, as we converse via Zoom. “So most of the companies are working from home, but the transport, coffee shops and restaurants are open to a degree – probably life is about 30 per cent normal I’d say.

“Basically, you can go out and have a run, go out for lunch but generally don’t meet anyone face-to-face, which you can understand. So it’s not too bad, just got to wait for this virus to be beaten.”

And there is a small plus side. “The great thing about wearing a mask is not many people recognise you,” he laughs. “Post the World Cup [in 2015] I definitely got a lot more people coming up to me in the street, but all of that’s gone now with the Corona.”

Had it not been for lockdown, Eddie would be back home in Australia. “After the Six Nations I was supposed to go and see my mum in Australia who’s going to be 95,” he says. “But then the self-isolation came in so, if I went back, I’d have had to stay in self-isolation for two weeks so we decided we’d come and see my wife’s family in Japan.

“At that stage it was pretty normal here, but we might as well be anywhere in the world now because, as you can see, you can do pretty much anything you want from here. I’ve set up in my own office in the hotel and I’ve got a gym here too so I’m in a pretty good situation.” 

Whether it’s through his Japanese mother Nellie, Japanese wife Hiroko, or his numerous coaching stints at universities, companies and the national side, Japan has influenced many aspects of Eddie’s life, so it seems a fitting location for an interview with him, even if we’re 6,000 miles apart at the time. 

Given his connections to the country, it would be an easy presumption that he first went to Japan at a young age, but it was actually not until his playing days were drawing to a close. “It’s a funny story actually,” he begins. “I finished playing for Randwick, I went and played for Leicester for half a year and then, I had to come back earlier than I thought, so my wife and I came back through Japan.

“One of my ex-Randwick coaches had coached at one of the clubs there so he said, ‘go and meet this bloke’. I just went and had a chat and he said, ‘look, there might be some coaching possibilities’. 

“I was just about to finish as a player, so we had a bit of a discussion and from that came an opportunity in Japan when the game went professional and it all started from there.”

Had you thought about coaching before? “Not really,” he admits. “I loved playing. I was the New South Wales hooker and the club’s first-grade hooker, then Phil Kearns, got picked out of second grade ahead of me for the Australian side. 

“When he came back to the club I dropped down to second grade, and the coach there was a good mate of mine and he said, ‘you talk a lot, you might as well coach them’, so I coached them and we won the comp. I thought I might as well have a go at this, it’s a bit of fun.”

At 32, although young, the idea of telling gnarled senior players what to do, never fazed him. “I was lucky because my profession was a PE teacher so it gave me a head start in how to organise things,” he says. “You see a lot of coaches from my era that were ex-teachers, it definitely gave us a head start as we knew how to organise a group, we knew how to speak to them.”

That first professional role took him to Tokai University in Japan. “They’d come last or second-last for nine years in a row, but in the first division,” he says, before adding, “and I didn’t improve them mate – they came second-last. 

“But it was the most wonderful coaching experience, I had 110 kids I think,” he continues. “One coach, me, having to coach 110 kids! They’d always done the session together, 110 kids together on a rolled pitch, so I changed it to three groups of about 35 and, basically, I coached from four until about nine o’clock every night of the week, so it was the best coaching apprenticeship that you could do.”

Despite the lack of success in the league table, it pushed him on to want more. “The thing about coaching is it is about process,” he says, “it’s about getting the process right and sometimes you don’t have the best players and you don’t win, but you can still coach well. 

“That taught me the importance of process, of understanding the players you’ve got, of organising them as effectively as you can, and getting them to play as well as you can. And, if that doesn’t work out, then don’t get too disappointed.”

The stint also gave him his first insight into the Japanese mind. “It was interesting,” he says, pausing. “It’s the same everywhere you go, there are certain cultural nuances of people. English players have certain cultural nuances, Japanese players have certain cultural nuances and your skill is to pick that up quickly, work out the things you can change and the things you can’t change.

“For the Japanese, they love working hard, they don’t like to train easily. But, if you keep training them hard, they’ll still train hard but they won’t give you effort, they’ll pretend. 

“It’s like when you see them at work,” he continues, expanding on his point. “When I worked at Suntory [Sungoliath], I’d work from seven in the morning until 10pm most days and there’d be a couple of staff who’d just stay there – there’d be no work to do, but they’d stay there and pretend to work hard. 

“That taught me a lot about the players because you think they’re just going to work hard because you want them to work hard but, it’s just like anywhere in the world, you’ve got to engage them, you’ve got to have a relationship with them.”

Despite his heritage, that first stint was also his first real introduction to Japanese culture. “You’ve got to remember, Australia back then [when he was growing up] had a white Australia policy,” he explains, “so it was quite a discriminatory place, so my mother went out of her way to educate us to be Australians and not to have any sort of Japanese about us.”

Towards the end of his time with Tokai, he joined up with the national side, on the back of a horrendous Rugby World Cup campaign in South Africa. “They had just got beaten 145-17  by New Zealand at the World Cup and they put a headcase Japanese guy in charge who loved Randwick so they recruited Glen Ella as a backs coach. Then he asked Glen if he knew a forwards coach and, of course I was over there, so we basically coached them together.

“We had great fun and we won the Asian Championship that year and the Japan Rugby Union actually promised Glen and I could be the coaches for the 1999 World Cup but then they got cold feet and appointed Japanese coaches, which is probably a blessing in disguise.”

After Tokai and Japan came the Suntory Sungoliaths in 1997, his first attempt at coaching company rugby. “One of the most difficult things to get right in Japan is the fact Japanese players need to train more than normal rugby players do because they just don’t have the experience. They need to feel like they’ve trained hard and it’s trying to work out a way to balance that with the foreign players who you can’t over-train – so it’s getting the right fit, the right amount of training into them.

“Then it’s trying to create a more sophisticated style of rugby because, basically, all they did was watch tapes of Super Rugby and copy that. Basically, every team played like the Crusaders or the Brumbies back in those days.”

Eddie’s rugby upbringing also made an ideal fit for Japan. “I was lucky that my club in Australia, Randwick, was the home of running rugby,” he says. “So we wanted to play running rugby and, because the Japanese were small players, that was always the image I had in my head – to play running rugby and try to run teams off their feet. And because we couldn’t get involved in a set-piece contest, we needed to keep the ball, so it was quite an easy fit.”

Over the years, as he changed teams, countries and continents, Eddie has tweaked his thinking on the ‘Randwick Way’. “I’ve learnt to adapt it because I think you’re either an attacking coach or a defensive coach,” he says. “You either want to make the game or you want to get the opposition to make mistakes and you play off the mistakes. So, with England I feel we still play an attacking game, although we don’t play that much ball in hand – we try to create the game and then make the opposition come to us rather than the other way around.”

We have thirty minutes in Eddie’s diary and half of that has already elapsed, but he’s a good talker. We move on to the coaches that have had the most impact on his career. “Bob Dwyer, he was a significant influence,” responds Eddie. “He was ahead of his time, always thinking what was next, what was the best way to train – he’s someone I still think about now when I’m coaching. 

“The other guy I always admired was Laurie Mains, who coached the All Blacks – he was behind that ‘95 side that played brilliant rugby and, obviously, they got beaten in the final by a better team on the day [South Africa] – which is not dissimilar to us in 2019. Again, he always had his sides fit, they were hard, they always wanted to move the ball – I always enjoyed watching these sides play.”

When it comes to how he develops as a coach today, his biggest influence is analysis. “There’s a variety of ways [I try to improve],” he says.  “For instance, during this period now [of lockdown], every morning I watch one game, I pull it apart, and see what I can learn, see how we can improve our game. 

“I watched Wales v Georgia today and Wales did a play we used to do at Randwick, 10 flat to the line, inside option winger, 12, 13-15 running lines, hit the man in the gap.

“I’ve become much better at networking as well, so I’ll speak to a number of different coaches about various aspects. Last week I had a great Zoom meeting with Danny Kerry [Great Britain Hockey performance director] about how we can improve our training techniques – I’m just always looking for people who are smarter than me to learn from.

“And, coaching wise, it’s just exchanging ideas because the great thing is, there’s no idea that’s new, every idea has been used somewhere along the line, and the more you can exchange ideas, the more chance you’ve got of creating different versions of old ideas.”

We pick up the timeline of his coaching career again when he leaves Japan to return to Australia and the Brumbies. “I was lucky that a number of players at Brumbies were players I’d played with at Randwick – players like Ewen McKenzie and David Knox – so I already had a base of support there.

“It wasn’t a professional set-up though,” he continues. “I remember going to their first weights session and they were doing weights at Tuggeranong high school and there was a PE class in the gym at the same time. 

“I’d come from Suntory where you’ve got your own training centre and it’s very professional and you go to the Brumbies and you think, ‘goodness me, what’s happening here?’ 

“But there were some things that were much more advanced in terms of the players’ thinking and again, probably teaching helped me to understand the dynamics of the classroom. 

“You go into any classroom and you try to work out the three or four kids who are either going to make the class good or disrupt the class and you try to establish a relationship with them. It was the same at the Brumbies, understanding which players were going to be influential, establish a relationship with them and which players maybe I needed to move on, and getting those mechanics right.

“The first year I was terrible mate, I let what had happened the year before just continue and it wasn’t until three quarters throughout the season that I said, ‘we’re going to do this differently’ and we actually used the last five games of that year as preparation for the next year and we began our climb up the ladder.”

In year one, they finished tenth [from twelve]; in year two they finished fifth; year three saw them lose the final by a single point to the Crusaders; before they took their first title in his fourth and final year. 

Eddie had inherited a side that finished second the season before, but was in need of a rebuild. “I was just watching this afternoon, a great show on Netflix called The Last Dance about the Chicago Bulls and how they won five championships and then the owners wanted to dismantle the team because they felt that the productivity was starting to decline and they only wanted to keep [Michael] Jordan.

“Which is not dissimilar [to the Brumbies] because one of the key things about keeping a squad strong is understanding when productivity of players is starting to drop off – it might be only slight.

“Wayne Bennett, who was a great rugby league coach, always said to me, ‘whenever you’ve got two players, an older player and a younger player, make the change one year earlier’ because you’ll get eight years out of that younger player whereas you might get one year out of that old guy, and it’s so true. I’ve always stood by that principle.”

Once he got to grips with his role at the Brumbies and moved on senior players, he based his side around youngsters that included Stirling Mortlock and George Smith, who he plucked from Manly after one game. “I remember Ewen and I watching him play twenty minutes for his club,” he recalls. “He’d been someone who’d been identified as a good young player, but he’d had quite a troubled background and got into strife when he was young and ended up doing the last three years of his high school in Tonga – and then he came back and had this massive hair, his hair weighed more than he did. 

“Once he’d played twenty minutes, we said, ‘we’ve got to sign this kid’, and I think we signed him for AUS $20,000 – he turned out to be a bit of a bargain.

“We were ahead of the game then,” he continues on the Brumbies thread, “we played this three-phase structured play which isn’t interesting now because everyone’s playing it, but it’s funny how the cycle goes around. We were physically tough, we had great leadership we had young guys coming through, a nice bunch of senior guys and they had a great belief because they had their own style of rugby. Speak to those guys today and it’s still their most enjoyable part of their rugby careers.”

Winning Super Rugby with the Brumbies put him next in line for the Wallabies job, although it wasn’t the international job he had ambitions to coach.  “It’s a bit like when you play, you play at a certain level, you start playing well and then someone says maybe you might play for the next level and then you start thinking about it,” he explains. “Coaching’s the same, I don’t think you can be ambitious as a coach, I think all you’ve got to do is coach well. 

“I always say to coaches, ‘you don’t have to worry about your next job because if you do the job properly then people will want you, so just concentrate on doing your job well’. 

“The only team I had an ambition to coach, funnily enough, was Japan, because I wanted to prove that you could play good rugby with a little team at international level. That was the one thing.

“When Glen and I coached them in ‘96 they played some really good rugby and we thought ‘goodness me with some more work these guys could be really good’. And if you look, historically, Japan had spasmodically in the pre-professional days had some success, but when the game went professional they became a bit of a joke team and that was one of the things – I wanted the team to be respected and I think Jamie Joseph has done an outstanding job carrying it on and now World Rugby have got a respected team from Asia which is fantastic.”

Nonetheless, it was Australia that came calling first, and he transitioned to coach a side already full of his Brumbies players – did that make it easier or harder? “That’s a great question. Retrospectively, I think it was one of the most difficult things, and one of the things I did so badly,” he admits. “Because at the Brumbies, you’re a club team, you’re with the guys all the time, so you love them – they’re your players you love them, you socialise with them, your families know each other. 

“But when you get to international level, it’s an in/out team – no one’s ever ‘in’ the team and I don’t think I ever explained well enough to the Brumbies players that that relationship was going to change.

“Players that I once told that I loved and then I wasn’t showing them so much love, they couldn’t understand it. 

“I remember also having the same discussion with Graham Henry after he took the Lions to Australia in 2001, he had that same difficulty with his Welsh players. They had that great run remember, I think they had ten wins on the trot or something and he loved them, they loved him and they go on the Lions tour and he’s picking Dawson ahead of Howley or whoever it is.  You’ve got those same sort or machinations going on, so it’s quite a tricky situation.”

He took over a side that were the reigning world champions and victors over the British and Irish Lions under Rod Macqueen. “You either take over a side that’s been losing, or you take over a side that’s won and the coach decides to move on, so there are challenges in rebuilding a side,” he says. “It’s harder to rebuild a successful team because the players are seen as icons and, in fact, you have to move them on. 

“I thought I did a reasonable job up to 2003 to get the side up to compete in the [Rugby World Cup] final was a great experience y’know – coaching your own team, your own home country, in your home World Cup, fantastic. But then I had another rebuilding job to do straight away in 2004/5 and I failed in that and ended up getting the sack.”

What would you have done differently? “I had to rebuild it in personnel and I probably did that okay, but I wanted to rebuild the way we played, and I was probably too urgent and too drastic in wanting to change the way we played. 

“So, basically the attack system, we were going to go to a 2-4-2 attack system which in those days only the French played,” he continues, “and when we had Larkham fit and playing, that was fantastic for us, but when we didn’t have him we didn’t have another ten that could play that style. 

“I should have been more circumspect in changing that style over a period of time not going abruptly to it. That was a great lesson.”

At first, Eddie thought his dismissal had little impact, but the opposite proved to be the case. “It’s more in retrospect rather than immediate reflecting,” he says, “but I was obsessed with winning the next World Cup and when that dream got shattered it was everyone else’s fault, not mine. 

“I went to Queensland and I wanted to prove a point, I did some good work at Saracens and South Africa was just like a bit of fun for a while, but it did take me a while to adapt and change. 

“That’s one of the things I’ve learnt from the 2019 World Cup, now I just want the team to get better every day. Obviously, I want to win the World Cup but I’m not obsessed by winning it. If we keep on getting better, we’ll achieve that goal and I feel much more comfortable in taking this team on now.”

On paper, looking at the ups and downs, South Africa was a turning point for the Australian-born coach. “I think with South Africa I got the love of coaching back because I was just there as assistant coach,” he admits. “When you’re the assistant coach you’re the smartest bloke in the room because you never have to make the final decision – it was just fun. 

“I think it got the fun back because, like any job, there’s a serious part and an enjoyment part and it’s about getting that balance right. It’s the same in coaching, you’ve got to be serious, you’ve got to be committed, but you’ve also got to have an enjoyment part because sometimes you can lose that when you get too serious about the coaching. 

“I think I became too serious about the coaching and lost the enjoyment. The South Africa job definitely helped me get it back.”

Do you like being an assistant?  “Nah, bloody terrible,” he laughs. “I can do it for a short period of time, but it’s the only time I’ve ever done it and I don’t know if I could ever do it again.”

What was your most enjoyable job? “I think probably Japan,” he says. “Japan was fun, we had nothing to lose. I can remember the first couple of Tests we played, we played Kazakhstan in Almaty – this weird and wonderful place – and we didn’t kick the ball, we ran the ball from everywhere, and won 82-6.

“It was fun trying to change this team from a side that was seen as a joke to being a force in world rugby. We had ups and downs and we had a good group of players, we did things completely differently. It was good to then see the change and that’s not only the rugby community but in the country itself. Rugby now has gone from a boutique sport to one of the major sports.”

Although Eddie had wanted the job in ’96, he knows that the timing was right when he finally took the reins more than a decade later. “I definitely couldn’t have done it [earlier],” he says of his achievements with Japan. “One of the things you learn is that international coaching needs a fair bit of maturity and I always remember [Jose] Mourinho being asked whether he’d coach England and he said, ‘no, I’m 50, so I’m too young. I’ll do it when I’m 60’. 

“I could never work out that comment, but I do now. I think when you coach England as a side you’ve got to be quite sure of yourself because everyone’s coming at you, everyone’s got an opinion as to how you should do it, so you’ve just got to have that, ‘I’m just going to do the job and if people don’t like it, I can’t worry about that too much’.

“When you’re younger, you tend to be more sensitive I think, you tend to want to please people. International coaching isn’t about pleasing people.”

Does he miss the day-to-day of club and Super Rugby? “I loved that, every morning getting there at seven o’clock having a cup of tea, seeing the players, seeing the changes in the players and I do miss that. 

“That’s why the World Cup campaign is fantastic, because you get the players for eight weeks and you’re living with them, it’s the most fun part of the four-year cycle.”

While he’s been in lockdown, Eddie has also signed another contract with England, taking him through to his second World Cup with the side. Was he always going to sign up for longer? “When I took the job over, it was definitely a four-year job, I wanted to make England be a side that was respected and I think we did that.

“Then obviously we had a good World Cup campaign and the RFU chatted to me at the end of it and asked whether I’d consider going on.”

Before making his decision, he wanted one more Six Nations campaign. “I wanted to do the Six Nations because I wanted to make sure that I felt I could still influence the players,” he says. “Because you’ve got to be able to still stimulate the players and I felt like the Six Nations gave me an indication that I could, and I think we’ve got a great goal about wanting to be the greatest team ever.

“We want to get to the stage where England’s respected around the world as this team that plays fantastic rugby consistently – and we haven’t finished that project.”

And after England? Japan maybe? “I’m not sure mate,” he says. “I wouldn’t mind coaching Hawaii mate! I can see myself coaching in Waikiki, putting board shorts and a t-shirt on every day.” 

Words by: Alex Mead

Illustration by: Mark Long

This extract was taken from issue 10 of Rugby.
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