England's head coach Eddie Jones. Photo / James Crombie.
England's head coach Eddie Jones. Photo / James Crombie.
Poor old Eddie Jones. Let's see…he won't use public transport any more after being roughed up by Scots supporters on the train and now Wales ("a shit place") and "scummy" Ireland may be off limits as well.
The walls seem to be closing in, don't they? Two losses in a row for England and a fired-up Irish team intent on a grand slam – a result which will be known by the time you turn the pages on the print edition of the Herald on Sunday.
It'd be all too easy to point to Jones' coaching career and suggest he has approached that curious time when the magic stops…or, if it doesn't stop, it has a little holiday, followed by a vote of confidence, followed by a new job.
There are probably two distinct kinds of rugby coaches – "emotion" coaches and technical coaches. The former are the blood-and-guts, twangy heartstrings types. Their shelf life tends to be shorter as, after a while, the players have heard it all before.
Technical coaches often last longer as they bring change – as Jones has done, although no one could watch present-day England and call it wholesale change. After all, you can't teach a carthorse to juggle in a couple of seasons.
Either way, a coach has a limited life span with any team. Jones started on top with the Brumbies' Super Rugby title in 2001, leapfrogging to the Wallabies where he went well until 2005 when they lost seven in a row, one of them to, you know, that "shit place". He then went back to Super Rugby with the Reds but a three-year deal ended after one year and a 92-3 hiding from the Bulls, of all people.
He went to South Africa as an assistant to 2007 World-Cup winning Jake White and an aborted stint at Saracens before taking over at Japan, whose 2015 World Cup win against South Africa propelled him into the England job.
That possibly had more to do with South Africa's woes than Japan's emergence as a rugby power – but you can't deny how well Japan played that day.
England head coach Eddie Jones. Photo / Getty Images.
Perhaps Jones' biggest triumph was the 2003 Rugby World Cup semifinal win over the All Blacks, turning around a 50-21 loss the last time the two sides had met in Australia.
As poorly as John Mitchell's All Blacks played, the Wallabies' win was stirring and deserved.
Even Sir Graham Henry, or so the gossip has it, had reached the end of his time with the All Blacks after the 2011 World Cup. The word from the playing camp was they had had enough of his style and wanted a change.
Truth be told, I feel kind of sorry for Jones, even with all the smart-ass stuff he indulges in – usually to unsettle opponents. At least he brings some colour to things.
His reference to Wales and Ireland was really just typical Aussie hubris; throwaway stuff at one of those sports gatherings where the audience wants to hear "the real oil" or some boys-will-be-boys behind-the-scenes hilarity.
And the joke's on Eddie – he got all moral about the Scottish supporters being beastly to him and then had to apologise contritely to Wales and Ireland.
His next gig could be the British & Irish Lions. Only it doesn't look so good if you call them "The British and shit place and scummy Irish Lions", does it?
Worse, Jones is on thin ice with the English media, who have been sharpening their canines for some time now while pretending to love him. They could scarcely do anything else. Even after the Scotland and France debacles, Jones has won 24 out of 27 – an 89 per cent win record, hardly sacking material.
But what he faces was probably personified by someone called Oliver Brown writing in London's Daily Telegraph. He chose Jones' foot-in-mouth to recall other instances when Australian coaches had baited other small countries, principally New Zealand, and trotted out sheep jokes – the archetypal Englishman looking down his nose at the colonies.
Kiwis, he said, had a skin about as thick as a sheet of sugar paper, recalling the time he'd written that the haka was in danger of becoming rugby's Cirque du Soleil – making the lead item on TV3 news and menaced by Kiwis threatening to visit his flat at 4am.
Yes, Ollie, it's all about you – and the cliché that is English rugby scribes taking a shot at the haka is not only boring and transparent, it portrays an indigenous culture limited to a pint of bitter and handing over blankets full of disease.
Brown's patrician dismissal of Jones' dismissal of Wales was revealing: "In the present climate of exemplary punishment, it will be a wonder if the Rugby Football Union do not bow to pressure and submit Jones to some form of re-education programme on all things Welsh, possibly involving hikes in Snowdonia and footage of Ian Woosnam's Masters win on a loop."
Haw haw. Haven't laughed so much since Brexit. In that snide put-down of a country smaller than his own, Brown displays what Jones also has to fight against. It's a struggle he will eventually lose. They all do, in time.
