Eddie Jones interview: England are now benefitting from my selections

“It will be hot mate. We will have had the heaters on for three months before England arrive. I want to see Steve Borthwick up there sweating, mate. I want to see him wiping the sweat, dripping from his brow. I just hope Umbro have made him a light shirt.”

Eddie Jones is in rip-roaring form. Back in his beloved Tokyo, it is as if the humiliation of Australia’s 2023 World Cup campaign never happened, when defeats by Fiji and Wales led to the Wallabies’ elimination at the pool stages for the first time in their history. It is one of the enduring character traits of the former England head coach to seemingly spring back up from any predicament, no matter how dire, like rugby’s own Weeble man.

The prospect of plotting the downfall of Steve Borthwick’s side in his opening game back as head coach of the Brave Blossoms on Saturday has provided him with the perfect platform to relaunch himself in a duel with his former assistant. And the barbs are already flying, just like the good old times.

Five years ago, Jones took the England squad, which included Borthwick among the coaching team, to Miyazaki on the Japanese island of Kyushu to prepare for the heat and humidity of playing in the World Cup, two weeks before their first game.

Aside from recreating humid conditions during heated indoor training sessions using wet balls back in the dull spring weather at Bagshot in Surrey, Jones knows that Borthwick’s England squad will not have had the same time to adapt when the two sides meet at the Japan National Stadium, in front of an expected crowd of 65,000. The forecast is for temperatures reaching 30 degrees Celsius with a humidity of over 60 per cent.

“Yeah, it is a fantastic stadium, it is going to be humming, mate, as well as humid,” Jones adds with his trademark cheeky grin.

‘I’m not sure I ever lost it’

If a warm welcome awaits England, it also seems that rediscovering the love of the game and the verbal jousting has not been a problem for the 64-year-old, despite the manner of his departure from the Wallabies job last October, just 10 months into a five-year contract and less than a year after he had been sacked by the Rugby Football Union.

“I’m not sure I ever lost it,” he adds. “I took on the Australian job knowing that it was going to be difficult. And I took on the job with a longer-term view of changing Australian rugby and they needed to make structural changes. We agreed that they needed to make structural changes. And therefore, the contract that I had was structured so that if they weren’t committed to do it – because they needed considerable money to do it – then all bets were off. And that’s what happened.

“Mate, I loved it. I didn’t love the results obviously. But I loved the challenge of trying. In reality it was pretty stupid. We had three days together before going into the first Test week [a 43-12 defeat by South Africa in Pretoria], then we were on the road the whole time. We had a three-day camp in Darwin [to prepare for the World Cup].

“But they are the challenges mate. If you don’t do it, why coach? You have to take on things. If we had been a bit better in the Fiji game and we had struggled through to the quarter-finals people would have said, ‘Oh, well that’s a great job.’

“I didn’t do a bad job. I didn’t do a good job. I look back, I think it was a great experience. I tried to do what I set out to do so I never really lost that love of the game and that’s why I was so keen to keep on coaching. Now, coming back to Japan, apart from Australia it is a bit of a spiritual home for me. I’m definitely getting to the ‘cue in the rack’ stage so I want to give back to the game and produce a Japan team that people are proud of.”

And so the wheel turns again. It was the work he did with Japan leading into the 2015 World Cup, and the historic defeat of South Africa in the pool stage, that led to him being appointed as the successor to Stuart Lancaster as England head coach. With his long-standing association with Japanese club Suntory, he is back in familiar and comfortable surroundings to attempt to reinvent himself once again.

The challenges are familiar ones. The teams in League One are no longer based on companies but are now stand-alone professional entities which has raised issues over player release to the national side which has led to a battle over money and time, while just under half the players in the league are overseas players.

‘In Japan, it’s like a pure attacking game’

So does he really believe he can restore Japan’s ability to compete with the world’s best, as they did in 2015 and again in 2019 when they defeated Ireland and Scotland to reach the World Cup quarter-finals?

“We can be even better mate, I have got no doubt about it,” he says. “It will take its time. You definitely won’t see it on June 22 [against England] unless God decides to give me a gift and I don’t know if he is that benevolent to me. But yeah, I think we can get better, mate.

“The change in the competition here in League One means it is now very much like Super Rugby was in its infancy. It is almost like this pure attacking game. It was exciting and popular and the crowds are going through the roof. It is not a purist’s game, it is fast and loose and for Japanese rugby, it is fantastic mate. Everyone wants a quicker game and that is the direction the game is going. We have got some of the best players in the world playing here and that is only going to help Japanese rugby in the future. Playing against England will be fun.”

Fun. You can’t be sure if that is another coded message to Borthwick. But what does Jones make of England? Jones’s handling of young talent in England drew criticism for a scattergun approach to selection. The likes of George Martin, Ben Earl, George Furbank, Tommy Freeman were among a high number of young players to have come into the England side under Jones only to be spat out the other side. I wonder if the fact that they have all emerged as key players under Borthwick gives Jones a sense of pride, knowing that his first instinct was right, or of missed opportunities?

He draws parallel with the squad he inherited back in 2016 in the wake of England’s pool-stage World Cup exit that led to Lancaster’s departure.

“I was fortunate to come on the back of Stu Lancaster because he did a lot of preparatory work for the team,” he adds. “They weren’t quite ready to win at the 2015 World Cup and then we had a good period with them. But then we needed to recycle the team and that is the difficult stage because you bring young players in like George Martin, Alex Coles and Furbank who are all coming through now. They are not quite ready, but give them a taste and they go back to their clubs and the good ones work hard and they come back better players and then the second time they get a go, if they’re good enough players, they generally then kick on.

“We picked George Furbank for the first game after the 2019 World Cup and he had a tough old game. I think he had one more game in that Six Nations and then regressed a little bit. But that sometimes happens. But then they come back stronger and more equipped to handle international rugby. Failure in some ways at the start of a player’s international career can make their career.

“Jonny Wilkinson is probably the most vivid example. Matt Giteau is the same. Giteau’s first two Tests were horrific but then he goes on and plays 100-plus Tests. Jonny’s first start was in England’s 76-0 defeat by Australia. No-one said then that Wilkinson was going to be a Test champion.

“You hope you are going to see the players again. You hope they will go back to their clubs and work hard. If you have picked the right character then they generally do. At some stage you might think ‘Ah s---, I’ve made a mistake here.’ Players are full of vulnerabilities. What you are trying to do is get them to believe in themselves and be the best version of themselves. When they are young, they are trying to prove themselves and if they don’t have success early, then it can lead to them being fairly vulnerable. They go back to their clubs, fix their game and come back even stronger.

“If a group of those young players can stick together and become the backbone of a new model of England side – because the Farrells, the Vunipolas, Ben Youngs etc are coming to their end there’s an evolution of a team coming again. That’s a cycle of coaching. Sometimes you get the good end of it, sometimes you don’t. You can’t complain, it’s all part and parcel of coaching at international level.”

The scattering of subplots provides extra intrigue to a game that England should win comfortably. Given that Jones worked with Borthwick as his assistant first at Japan and then for four years with England, the Australian has a fair idea about what he expects from England on Saturday.

“At the World Cup they committed to a style of play and became pretty proficient at it,” he adds. “That’s good coaching. Now he [Borthwick] has got the team playing the way he wants to play and I think he has done a really good job and there is some good talent coming through. So it is going to be a good challenging game for us. But there are different ways to skin a cat, mate.” Yes, Eddie, in his latest reincarnation, is back.