‘I want to leave Australian rugby in a better place than it was’
Before the Wallabies’ must-win game against Wales, the besieged coach hits back at his critics and reveals the ambition driving his second stint in charge.
Besieged Wallabies coach Eddie Jones says he does not know how long he will remain in the job, but when his time is up he wants to leave Australian rugby in a better place than what he found it.
The veteran coach, under pressure five months into the job with one win from seven games, says he will weather and accept the criticism being thrown his way, but he maintains he is helping to lay the foundation of a World Cup winning team for 2027.
“I made the choice to do this; you make choices all the time in life and I made this choice that I want to give something back to Australian rugby,” Jones said.
“Whenever I finish, I want to feel like I leave Australian rugby in a better place than it was.”
In an exclusive interview with The Weekend Australian, Jones said what had become clear over the past five months was Australian rugby has been unable to foster the elite on-field leadership needed to win a World Cup and the code’s junior pathways were the “most broken”.
To break the cycle of failure, culling senior players was a necessity to start the rebuild.
Former All Blacks coach Steve Hansen, a friend of Jones’s who was in Wallabies camp in the build-up to this World Cup, observed some parts of Australia’s high-performance program were 15 years behind the All Blacks.
What has become clearer to Jones in recent times is the lack of strong leadership in Australian ranks. While the omission of veteran playmaker Quade Cooper and former captain Michael Hooper has caused consternation and debate, Jones says such decisions were made to address what he has previously described as “deeper cultural issues” within the Wallabies.
“Well, you know good teams are always about good leaders and about good senior players and their ability to generate a strong team,” Jones said.
“And I think what’s happened over the last period of time – there’s been a there’s been a lack of leadership coaching in Australian rugby and there’s players who come through to the international level that don’t have the fundamental skills of leadership and the mental skills and preparation that are needed to be at your best consistently.”
What is also obvious to him is general standards had dropped severely before he arrived at Rugby Australia HQ – and there needs to be a raising of the bar, not only at an elite level, but across the whole rugby community. “I think generally speaking what has happened is that just the standards have dropped,” Jones said. “I think it’s got really badly affected by Covid, where basically, you know, players are on minimal training loads. It was minimal staff and there was minimal expectation and, and really Australia hasn’t recovered from that yet and, and there needs to be a raising of the standards, the raising of expectations across the whole – the whole rugby community.”
The loss to Fiji – Australia’s first in 69 years – has seen a torrent of criticism stream Jones’s way.
Former All Black turned Channel 9 TV commentator Sonny Bill Williams said Jones had been “found out”, while ex-Wallaby Drew Mitchell unloaded on the coach on a podcast.
“You’ve (Jones) made some glaring decisions around Quade (Cooper), around Michael Hooper, six captains in seven weeks, like, f--king explain some of these decisions to us,“ Mitchell said on The Good, The Bad and The Rugby podcast.
Former Wallabies coach Alan Jones in his News Corp column said experienced heads such as Cooper should have been picked. When asked about the suggestion more experienced players should have been included on this team, Eddie Jones brushed it off and noted this iteration of the Wallabies was in a rebuild.
“I don’t even pay any attention to it,” Jones said of the criticism. “Particularly ex-coaches that make comments like that. You know, they know that at some stage in the team (cycle) you have got to build a new team and that comes with difficulties.
“Sometimes you can do it (rebuild a team) quicker than others. But generally speaking, to turn any team around, there’s a three-year process to turn the team around and you have to make adjustments somewhere along the line. We could have kept a number of senior players, but is that going to help the development of the team going forward? So you’re always making decisions for today and decisions for tomorrow.
“You’re weighing it and the judgment is how many (decisions) you make for tomorrow and how many you make for today and that’s a continual juggling act that you’re doing.”
Australian rugby is not more broken than he expected, as Jones said he knew the task was not going to be easy.
“I always knew this was going to be difficult,” he said. “I didn’t think it was going to be easy; I always knew it was going to be really tough. There’s plenty of good talent. There’s no lack in talent, but, you know, you get to the World Cup and every team’s talented. It’s about your work ethic, your application, your attention to detail and all those things take time to turn around. And I’ve been able to turn it around as coach, (but) I haven’t coached well enough, I haven’t been able to turn it around quick enough.”
This World Cup was not a “smash and grab” job as Jones had once hoped; rather it was a “rebuild”.
But with the coach the subject of foul-mouthed tirades by former Wallabies, the heat rising on his team selection, and rookies and seniors broken by injury, this still is not the worst position Jones has been in his illustrious coaching career.
Instead, he likens it to the situation he was confronted with when he took over coaching Japan in 2012, though Jones said then he had more time.
“With Japan, I had four years to turn them around, but here I’ve only really had five months,” he said. “So we’re just racing the clock. But I can see change in the team, but it’s just not quick enough at the moment.”
Jones, and others, will say Australia’s onfield performance can be linked back to a systemic failure and neglect at its grassroots. When rugby had its moment to fly in the early 2000s, not enough was done. Instead the game slowly burned, almost to the ground.
As rugby league clubs cherrypick most of the best juniors, Jones laments the talent lost.
Once proud rugby schools in Sydney such as Scots, Kings, Trinity and Newington colleges, plus Anglican Church Grammar School in Brisbane, have produced NRL stars Cameron Murray, Angus Crichton, Kalyn Ponga and now Siua Wong.
“That’s probably the system that’s the most broken,” Jones said. “When you’re a small sport like rugby in Australia, whatever talent you’ve got, you’ve got to identify quickly what is your top five, 10 per cent and you’ve got to make sure that the talent is being absolutely optimised and you don’t lose that because you know that top five in the senior player group is the five or 10 per cent that rugby league want … and that now maybe Aussie Rules want.
“You’ve got to cultivate those players with good habits with a love for rugby … because rugby does present opportunities that other sports don’t get, like playing in this World Cup – you don’t get that in rugby league or AFL.
“You’ve got to be putting those opportunities in front of the players, keeping your best talent and not losing it. And what I see over the last 10 years, particularly, a lot of the good talent has been lost.”
If the result does not go Australia’s way against Wales on Sunday (Monday morning AEST), what does that loss say?
“Firstly, I haven’t done the job well enough,” Jones said. “I am happy to accept that … but secondly there’s a rebuilding job to be done and I’m just starting and I’m just putting down the foundations.”
And a win?
“Then we’re on to Portugal and all we’ll worry about is Portugal,” he said.
As Jones sounds upbeat in a difficult time, he reiterates he is only in the job for one reason.
“I accept all the criticism, I accept all the negativity, but you know, for me it’s always been about coming back home at the end of my career and I’m at the place where I want to give something back to Australian rugby,” he said.
“I know if I finish in three weeks or finish in three years, I want to make sure that Australian rugby is in a better place and sometimes the results don’t show that, but sometimes you get results further down the line.
“I see this team as the basis of a World Cup-winning team in 2027.
“You just look at the age profile of this team, it’s almost perfect. Yeah, it’ll be perfect by then.”
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