How Eddie Jones can save English rugby

Eddie Jones’s intruction manual for restoring England pride lies in Leicester, the Wallabies and even Apple.

At the 2007 World Cup in France, Wales famously flunked out, lost to Fiji, failed to make the quarter-finals and immediately sacked their coach, Gareth Jenkins. The calamity heralded the recruitment of Warren Gatland who arrived to a fair old drum roll and immediately won a grand slam.

No pressure, Mr Jones, but precedent is there. You’ve had your own drum roll, so can England be a turnaround team too?

The issue of judgment for Eddie Jones, here, is the pace of change he attempts to exact. On the one hand, you could say the fixture schedule favours England and is set up for fast change.

Get past Scotland away, you then have Italy away and that’s a nice momentum-builder for the two games you really want at Twickenham: Ireland and Wales.

You would rather that than a first-up away game in Dublin, which is what Wales have. On the other hand, Jones has tried to trigger rapid change from his teams before and he admits that he has sometimes misjudged the pace at which he can catalyse revolution. Try to move too fast and it can backfire.

He has been sacked from two jobs in his career — from Australia in 2005 and the Queensland Reds in 2007 — and the speed of intended change was a key reason why.

Every coaching manual talks about building a team rather than revolutionising one: layer by layer, start with good foundations. Yet turnaround is possible too, so here, helpfully in short form, is Jones’s turnaround success manual.

Leicester City FC

Bottom of the English Premier League in April last year, we all know where they are now. And Claudio Ranieri has not tried to stage a revolution, he has just tinkered smartly and reaped quick ­rewards.

The lesson: small changes can transform the contribution of players. Jamie Vardy, now a super-striker, was often on the bench last season and when he was used, it was often wide left. Likewise, Riyad Mahrez, who was often also a substitute, is now City’s prime playmaker. The product of Vardy’s pace up the middle, from Mahrez’s distribution, is a counter-attack that is putting the rest of the league to the sword.

Leicester, last season, fulfilled the cliche of being better than their position in the league. England, after early elimination from the World Cup, are exactly the same.

And Jones can extract more from players in the same way. He will clearly have a different No 7 and attempt to extract far more from England at the breakdown. It seems, too, that he will build a game around George Ford (not drop him). Ford, like Mahrez, has the ability to make players around him look better, too.

The Wallabies

When Michael Cheika took over as Australia coach in October 2014, he was on a plane to Europe within a fortnight for the autumn tour where they lost three of their four games. A year later, they were in the World Cup final.

The key lesson here for Jones is technical. Opposition teams, especially in the northern hemisphere, notably England and France, could persuade themselves that they had the Wallabies’ number because they could always take them in the scrum. By the time Cheika’s team had arrived in England for the World Cup, they were ready to challenge that perception.

Transforming England’s scrum, likewise, must be one of Jones’s priorities. How fast he can do that, though, is debatable. Cheika did it by hiring Mario Ledesma, the Argentine scrum zealot. Jones has not been able, yet, to appoint a scrum specialist; the best he can get is part-time access to Ian Peel, formerly the England Under-20 coach. Conversely, the England scrum does not have to be reinvented as it is not starting from as far back as the Australian one. It needs revivifying, not recreating.

Apple

“Turnaround” is, of course, more a term for the business pages than us lot here at the fun end of the paper, but we like numbers too, and the lessons are transferable. The return of Steve Jobs is the No 1 case study for business studies students; the Apple he returned to in 1997 was near bankruptcy but soon he had it playing Nokia and other technology rivals off the park.

It helped that the Apple Jobs returned to was a mess and therefore more willing to accept change (cue England comparisons). More significantly, he gave the company direction — a game plan — with the iPod. Big risk but he carried the team with him and they got behind it.

England, for too long, have lacked that — a style, an identity, a plan. They have flitted between one and another and been the masters of none.

Jones needs to give England their iPod. With some tinkering (Leicester), a decent scrum (Australia) and an iPod (Apple), it is possible that he could do a first-year grand slam too.

The Times