It is 50 miles from Penrith to Randwick, little more than an hour’s drive from one side of Sydney to the other. Back in the 1980s, the state of England’s modern‑day cricket and rugby union teams was shaped between the two. In those days Trevor Bayliss was batting No 3 for Penrith and Eddie Jones was playing hooker for Randwick. Flick through the old Sydney papers and you’ll sometimes find their names side by side in the local results roundups. So the day after New South Wales won the Sheffield Shield, TH Bayliss c & b Rackemann 58, Jones was playing for Sydney in an “80‑minute stoush” against a touring team from the USSR.
The two of them were knocking around the Sydney circuit at the same time, and had similar careers in that they both played for the state without ever making the leap to the national team. Seems likely there’s even an old scorecard somewhere that knots their two threads together, since Jones played a few games of first‑grade cricket for Randwick in 1982, as middle-order bat and off-spinner, when Bayliss was a young colt at Penrith, just up from Goulburn. Jones quit cricket soon after because, he said, he was spending so much time in the nets that he wasn’t getting anything else done.
All these years later Jones and Bayliss have been pulled back into each other’s orbit by two sets of equally desperate English sports executives at the ECB and RFU, each trying to find a way to repair the damage done during their teams’ disastrous World Cup runs. In 2015 both teams had been trounced in the group stages by Australian sides who went on to play New Zealand in the final (only one won) and both boards decided, six months apart, that it was finally time to appoint an Australian as head coach.
It’s the inverse of Australia’s old cultural cringe, a kind of English athletic obeisance.
The English have lost against the Australians so often that we tend to assume almost anyone with a hint of that accent can handle a bat, kick a decent spiral, and swim a nifty 50m free. So of course when the cricket and rugby teams crapped out in the group stages, both boards decided to hire a couple of gnarly Aussie pros – Bayliss, 55, Jones, 58 – to come and fix it for us in 2019. They replaced Peter Moores and Stuart Lancaster, two very modern English managers, good guys, competent company men who had all the necessary certificates but didn’t quite cut it in international sport.
Bayliss and Jones have spent some time together since they came over to England in 2015. Jones invited Bayliss out for dinner before he took the rugby team on tour to Australia in 2016, and Bayliss had Jones over to watch one of England’s training sessions at Lord’s before they played Pakistan later that summer. English sport must have all seemed pretty straightforward to them then. Jones’s team were at a peak they haven’t reached since. And Bayliss was still enjoying their honeymoon bump, before the Test team were thrashed 4-0 by India that winter.
Two years on they will have even more to talk about. They are both under the heavy pressure that falls on England’s national coaches, beset by a pestilent press and a doubting public. Bayliss’s peculiar alchemy has turned England’s one-day team into gold and the Test side to lead, and no one is too sure if that is a price worth paying any more.
Jones coached his England team to 24 wins out of 25, and 18 in succession. Then the wheels blew off and now they have lost six games in a row. There were calls for Bayliss to step down from the Test team when England lost against Pakistan at Lord’s last month, and calls for Jones to go after the defeat by South Africa this Saturday. Both will press on.
Jones and Bayliss are an odd couple of coaches, a real Bert and Ernie of a pair. Seems each could learn something from the other. Jones is so driven that he’s beginning to sound a bit deranged. There are a lot of stories about his making work calls in the very early hours of the morning. He loves to talk about how Roger Bannister reset everyone’s understanding of what people can do when he ran the first four-minute mile. “No one really knows what the human body is capable of,” is one of his favourite quotes. He flogs his players so hard he seems determined to find an answer. His biggest fault, he says, is that he cannot tolerate people who are not as driven as he is.
Bayliss, on the other hand, couldn’t be more forbearing. “I don’t raise my voice,” he says. “If you rant and rave too much players get a bit of a tear in the eye.” He thinks it is his job to create a pleasant, positive environment for the players. If anything, he seems a bit bemused by how seriously the rest of us take the game. When they asked him if he was worried about being sacked he shrugged and said he would enjoy “spending a bit more time in the garden”.
The Test cricket team could do with a little of Jones’s intensity, the Test rugby team with a little of Bayliss’s insouciance. Both men may learn, in the end, that English sport has systemic problems even Australians cannot fix.
