Culture was a keyword in the Stuart Lancaster era but it will not spend much time on the lips of his successor, Eddie Jones, the Australian who signed a four-year contract at Twickenham on Friday to leave all four of the home union teams in foreign hands.
“There is no mystique about culture,” says Jones, who as well as coaching the Wallabies was a technical adviser to South Africa in 2007 and was in charge of Japan in this year’s World Cup having spent time in England with Saracens. “It is the way people behave and the way they talk. Language is the basis of culture and the big advantage for me is that I speak English, if badly. I tried to speak Japanese to the players there and that was bloody hard. You have just got to understand what is negotiable in the culture and what is non-negotiable.”
It is a winning culture that Jones has been hired to foster, not just matches but trophies. Lancaster had a better record in the Six Nations than Clive Woodward but his team always finished second to Wales or Ireland. By appointing a non-Englishman as head coach for the first time and by wasting no time in making the appointment after the review into the World Cup failure was completed, the Rugby Football Union’s chief executive, Ian Ritchie, has entwined his future with Jones’s; Ritchie made the recommendation to appoint Jones to his board after travelling to Cape Town last weekend.
“One of the first things I have to do is go around and meet all the directors of rugby,” says Jones. “I need their point of view on which of their players are worthy of playing international rugby. I will watch as many games as I can and I am not worried about what has happened in the past; it is all about the future. If Danny Cipriani’s good enough to be in the 30, he’ll be in the 30; if he’s not, he won’t be.”
Jones starts work on 1 December, giving him little more than a month before he has to announce his senior and Saxons squads under the terms of the elite player agreement between the RFU and Premiership Rugby. He will have to stick with his choices until the summer, although he will be able to make changes because of injuries and he will not be able to choose players from outside the Premiership unless he can make the case that someone is an exceptional circumstance.
Jones is a coach known for his candour and readiness to give straight answers to questions and more but he was circumspect in his trawl of media interviews on Friday afternoon, not willing yet to make his arguments in public. That will surely change but with little more than two months to prepare for England’s opening match of the Six Nations against Scotland at Murrayfield he needs everyone on his side.
“I have a fundamental knowledge of the players in England,” he says. “What I need to look at is making selections about who is going to fit into the team given the way we want to play. We are not going to be all ready when we play Scotland but, if you give the players understanding and prioritise the things you can change quickly, we can put in a good performance.
“It’s about maximising resources. The players will have to improve their skill levels like every player in the world. I always cite the example of Ma’a Nonu. When he first came in 10 years ago he just trucked the ball up and never passed it. He wasn’t a particularly bright player. Since then he’s developed himself into an unbelievably skilled player who makes the right decision when to kick and can throw off left and right. When you look at a player you do not just think about what he can do but what he has the potential to do.”
Jones will not be drawn on which England players impressed him during the World Cup, who his captain will be or what his coaching team will look like. “All I can say is that there are some good players out there, really good players.” He says he has yet to decide whether to recommend the appointment of a team manager to act as a political buffer and that he looks forward to jousting with Woodward, his opposite number in the 2003 World Cup final between Australia and England in Sydney, who, while welcoming Jones’s appointment, was contemptuous of the manner in which it had been made.
“We spar well. There is no reason why we can’t continue to but in what fashion I don’t know,” says Jones “I would always speak to him and I would love to have a cup of coffee with Clive. I have not spoken to him yet but I am sure I will.”
