Once Eddie Jones gets his visa sorted out, the thing he needs to do before anything else is decide the future of England’s assistant coaches. If rumours are true, there has been little if any contact. Irrespective of what may be happening behind the scenes Mike Catt, Andy Farrell and Graham Rowntree are good people and good coaches and they deserve to know where they stand.
Whatever decision is made, it is clear that part of Jones’s brief is succession planning. It would be unthinkable to find ourselves in four years’ time, after the next World Cup, in the same position of scrabbling around for a new coach.
The existing structure has a head coach with three specialist assistants beneath him. Jones may look to replicate this with specialist coaches such as Steve Borthwick looking after key areas of the game and feeding into a wider gameplan defined and delivered by Jones. The role of this unit coach requires hours of intensive research, an eye for detail in constantly searching for opposition strengths and weaknesses, and space to think about how to be innovative around implementing and engaging with the players.
A number of the other candidates who have been touted as possible choices to work under Jones are the directors of rugby at Premiership clubs, such as Rob Baxter at Exeter and Jim Mallinder at Northampton. They are easy answers to the challenge of succession planning but the question must be whether they want to be a No2, or whether they even fit the role. In Baxter’s case we now have a clear answer as he has ruled himself out, saying he does not want to be an assistant having been running his own show for the past few years.
The role of director of rugby takes many different shapes, depending on internal structures at particular clubs, and can involve different responsibilities. Most but not all of us will have come from coaching backgrounds, developing through the role of a unit coach before being promoted to head coach and finally taking on the lead role.
Going from assistant coach to the top job is a big step at a club, let alone with England, and the skill-sets are very different. When Bob Dwyer was sacked at Bristol I suddenly found myself as director of rugby at the age of 34. I went from studying lineouts to managing a £3m wage bill, and I didn’t even know how to open a spreadsheet.
This is a key distinction between our own professional league and others that are under governing body control. A Super Rugby head coach has only one focus and that’s coaching, whereas a Premiership director of rugby’s job description will range from recruitment, contracts and budgets to overall rugby strategy. These wide-ranging job requirements, which are peculiar to our domestic league, rob us of the most valuable commodity a coach possesses: time to think.
I took the conscious decision to leave the director of rugby job at Bristol and to go to Gloucester, stepping back to work as the head coach under Nigel Melville as director of rugby because I did not feel I had learned enough of my trade. Three years later I became director of rugby at Gloucester because I felt ready for the job.
Across the Premiership you will find a mixed bag of directors of rugby, ranging from those who do no coaching at all, bar the facilitation of a weekend’s gameplan, to those who prefer to put on the tracksuit as often as possible. How many of the current crop would want to step back into a No2 role remains to be seen, though Baxter’s decision may have given us an idea. More importantly, how many wish to return to hours of analysis of specific areas of the game in front of a computer screen is another thing altogether.
Even if Jones fails to convince a director of rugby to join his set-up there are some outstanding English coaches to look at. It appears England have already approached Borthwick, who worked to good effect under Jones with Japan, to be involved with the forwards. Another who should be in the mix is Exeter’s backs coach, Ali Hepher. If you look around the Premiership and see who is getting the most out of their backline, you’d have to say it’s Exeter – yet you never hear Hepher’s name mentioned.
Northampton’s backs coach, Alex King, has quietly gone about his business and should also be considered. Both would be a welcome fresh set of eyes on England’s backline, an area sadly neglected over recent years. Let’s also not forget a certain Englishman coaching in Wales – Shaun Edwards’ experience in the international game in the northern hemisphere would be invaluable.
Whoever they choose, whether it is Borthwick analysing lineouts or Hepher coaching the attack, if Jones alone deals with the bigger picture they will not get the management experience to be ready to take over in four years. And so we will be back in the same position again – looking outside the camp for the next head coach. So much for succession planning. They cannot afford to get this wrong and be in the same position again in four years’ time.
