Eddie Jones starts work as England’s head coach in eight days but this week he is in Los Angeles taking part in a World Rugby workshop for the 10 tier-two nations in the recent World Cup which has the aim for two of them to qualify for the quarter-finals at the 2019 tournament in Japan.
Jones accepted an invitation to attend the workshop before his appointment by England having guided Japan to their best finish at a World Cup. They finished third in their pool and became the first team to win three matches but fail to qualify for the knockout stage.
“Japan’s victory over South Africa was a result that not only lit the touch paper for the tournament but one that put Asian rugby as a whole firmly on the map,” said Mark Egan, World Rugby’s head of competitions and performance. “Staff at the tier-two nations have told me Japan’s win gave them the confidence and belief anything was possible and as a result they went out to play a brand of attacking rugby rather than just dig deep in the hope of keeping the score down, which had arguably been the case in the past.
“With 30% more tries being scored and fewer points conceded in match-ups with tier-one nations, it was the most successful tournament to date from a tier-two perspective. Our hope was to have one tier-two nation qualifying for the knockout stages and Japan would have achieved that goal in any other tournament. The bar remains high as our target for 2019 is to have two tier-two quarter-finalists and more shock results along the way. The unpredictability of outcome is what draws people in and makes for great sporting theatre.”
World Rugby part-funded 106 of the management positions of the tier-two unions at the World Cup through its £10m-a-year budget for developing nations which was supplemented by extra cash for the World Cup and £1m for central projects, such as player insurance. “The investment programme made a real difference on the field of play,” said Egan. “The tier-two nations have significantly more resources to spend on their elite programmes than they did before the investment programme started in 2007, and they’re also playing more tests against tier-one nations than ever before. This has clearly been a contributory factor to the levelling of the playing field that we witnessed at the World Cup. We hope to grow that number: the United States are bringing big fixtures into their market while Ireland and Scotland are scheduled to tour Georgia and Japan.”
One of Jones’s first tasks when he takes up his England post on 1 December, only two months before the Six Nations, will be to decide his coaching team for the next four years. Steve Borthwick, who was Japan’s forwards coach this year, has been tipped as a contender but Bristol have said he will be staying with them.
Bath have confirmed the signing of Racing 92’s Luke Charteris. The Wales second-row will move next summer.
