Eddie Jones may be in overall charge but he is only the second most talented Australian currently coaching England’s players. It is possible that, until recently, some of the squad thought Glen Ella was a valley in the Scottish Highlands; soon they will all be wishing they had met their new backline mentor earlier in their careers.
Because if anyone can broaden the horizons of English back play and transform their attacking mindset it is an individual once described by the former Wallaby coach Bob Dwyer as the most naturally gifted member of the extraordinary Ella family. Given Glen’s twin brother, Mark, ranks among the game’s all-time shimmering stars and captained Australia, that is some call. Dwyer, though, was adamant: “To see him running among opposition players, stepping off his left foot and right foot in turn, was to be reminded of an ice skater.” For such a sharp rugby mind to be honing England’s young players on antipodean soil really is a coup.
One of 12 children from an aboriginal household in the Sydney suburb of La Perouse, Ella first met his former school-mate Jones at the age of five and the pair played for Randwick alongside, among others, the present Wallaby coach, Michael Cheika, and the incomparable David Campese. It was a different era, but the principles that made the Ella brothers so mesmerisingly effective are precisely those Jones is seeking to instil in his modern English midfield: flat to the gainline, quick off the mark, direct running, deft passing and an instinctive appreciation of space.
Can this transformation be smoothly engineered and, if so, how long will it take? Ella, who won four caps for Australia in the early 1980s and turned 57 on Sunday, is not promising instant miracles but has seen enough to believe, unlike some of his compatriots, that European back play is not a totally lost cause. “In Australia they don’t give any credit to the northern hemisphere,” he says. “They think Super Rugby at the moment is much better than the Six Nations. While some of that could be true, it’s up to us to prove that it’s not. I watched the Six Nations and it might not have been the standard, but you could see there was something there.”
Since Jones contacted him and invited him to help out on tour, he has been further encouraged by the quality of the available raw material. “I texted Eddie during the Six Nations and said: ‘These guys have actually got some talent.’ I hope I can have some influence so that by the time they come to Sydney for the third Test they’ll be playing the way Eddie wants them to play. It’s not a case of snapping your fingers and tomorrow we’ve got a backline capable of playing the way Australia does. When you’re adjusting different parts of your game it feels awkward until you feel comfortable with it. I’m just helping the guys along, giving them some hints, having a look at their running lines and adjusting them as I see fit.”
Having previously worked as Australia’s assistant coach under Rod Macqueen and Jones, Ella sees certain similarities with the days when George Gregan and Stephen Larkham were finding their international feet as promising young Wallabies. His younger brother, Gary, reckons his sibling will improve his players’ confidence in their own ability and, leaving aside patriotic loyalties, is hopeful of a positive result. He told a local interviewer last week: “While I won’t be cheering for the English team just because he’s coaching, if they do win I know he’s going to get a bigger boat so I’ll be happy.”
Is there anything stopping Glen from taking the job full-time should England win the series and Jones offer him a permanent position? “It’s called a wife. I am not looking that far ahead. Yes, it’d be a great experience to link up with Eddie again, but we’ve got to do the job here first. We’ll worry about it afterwards.”
Last year he did no full-time coaching, but working for England does not remotely bother him. “It’s a professional game. There are foreign coaches everywhere in English football and Wayne Bennett is coaching English rugby league. I’ve coached all over the world; with John Kirwan in Italy, with Fiji. It doesn’t really matter; it’s the way the game’s gone.”
Beating the Wallabies on their own patch, therefore, would be sweet even if his old friend Cheika ends up disappointed. “That’s the great thing about rugby. You can play a game, belt the other bloke in the mouth and have a drink afterwards. That’s the ethos.
“We want to make this a pretty good series and we want to win it. As Eddie says we don’t do this for practice, we do this because we want to win.”
Sprinkling stardust over a first set of English pupils
A former Wallaby full-back and part of one of Australia’s most famous sporting families, Glen Ella’s CV stands up to the strictest of scrutinies, having held coaching roles with Japan, Australia, Fiji, Italy, Canada and his country’s sevens team.
Yet one particular secondment stands out. Sandwiched between his first stint as Australia assistant at the 1995 World Cup and a move to Japan to team up with Eddie Jones for the first time, was a six-month spell at Stourbridge – a former glass-making town deep in the West Midlands.
Currently in National League 2 North, the fourth tier of the English pyramid, but back then plugging away in what was known as Area League North, Stourbridge is hardly the sort of outpost you would expect someone of Ella’s pedigree to turn up along with his wife, Julie, and children, Daniel and Jessica. But when Jon Collins, a Stourbridge captain in the 1980s, emigrated to Australia and turned out for Randwick, a bond between the clubs was formed and, as a result, Ella is no stranger to sprinkling a bit of stardust on willing English pupils.
“There was a real sense of excitement among the players, he was the first overseas coach that we ever had. Oh my God, they were all falling over, all over the shop. He brought a completely new approach to the game. It was very exciting, very attacking,” remembers Norman Robertson, a former Stourbridge captain, president and chairman.
“He was exceptionally popular, he’d have time for everyone. He wasn’t ‘I’m a star, do as I say’, he took the players with him which is always the sign of a good coach. I’ve subsequently seen him a few times when I’ve been across in Australia and had lunch with him and I can’t speak highly enough of him.”
Ella has had limited time to work with England before the first Test in Brisbane, but George Smith’s brief breakdown tutorials during the Six Nations bore fruit and as Jones has been at pains to point out, “the idea that to become skilled at something you need to practise for 10,000 hours is baloney”.
At Stourbridge, significant improvements were not exactly immediate but it cannot be coincidence that just a year after Ella departed in 1997, they broke the league record for the number of tries two years in succession, averaging more than five a match.
“It was somewhat cold when he first turned up. He came in late September-October,” says Robertson. “There had been a cold spell and he came with his hat and gloves on but he very quickly acclimatised.
“He brought a completely new perspective on how we should be looking at the game and how we should be coaching. You’re never going to suddenly go from losing 20-0 to winning 20-0 but the thing he brought was this eye for a gap and eye for setting up attacks. He brought the best out of the players and he did it without them knowing it. He certainly had an influence on the philosophy of the club and the subsequent coaches.”
Unfortunately for Robertson he never got the chance to see Ella lace up his boots, although he recalls one near miss with more relief than regret. “We used to play a local derby on Boxing Day and I said to him: ‘Come on Glen, have a game. Why don’t you just go on the bench and we’ll bring you on for the last 20 minutes.’ To which he said: ‘I will if you will.’ I thought ‘Christ almighty’. I must have been mid-40s but I agreed.
“I woke up on Boxing Day, and there were about two inches of snow, and the match was cancelled. There was a god. I had refereed our opposition a couple of weeks before … I think I would have been killed.”
Gerard Meagher
