If anyone should know Eddie Jones the coach it is James Horwill. The former Australia captain was an aspiring Wallaby and just starting out with the Queensland Reds when he first encountered Jones back in 2006. So what advice would he give England’s current squad members when their new spiritual leader officially clocks on at Twickenham on Tuesday? Quite a lot, as it happens.
They should brace themselves, for a start. “He certainly shook things up,” recalls Horwill, reflecting on the impact Jones made upon arriving in Brisbane. “There’s no grey area. You work hard and you don’t want to be late. For a young guy – I was only 21 at the time – it put that fear factor into you when you turned up for the first day of pre-season. Every coach has his standards but if Eddie’s upset you know about it, rather than him hiding it. There were always funny stories, mainly about players receiving a bit of an Eddie Jones spray.”
Results, unfortunately, were less amusing. The Reds won only two games under Jones in the 2007 Super Rugby season and lost their final away match 92-3 to the Bulls in Pretoria. “We had a lot of injuries that season … we were pulling guys out of club rugby to play Super Rugby,” says Horwill. “It just wasn’t working and the vibe in the club wasn’t that great. There was a big transition of players … it wasn’t due to Eddie’s lack of work ethic but I don’t think Queensland was in the strongest place in the front office either.”
Interesting. For all the many successes in Jones’s career, there have been some rocky moments. The 30-year-old Horwill is now at Harlequins but sitting in the lobby of his new club’s training base in Guildford it seems a good moment to inquire about the coaches he rates the highest. Jones turns out to be somewhere in the middleorder.
“I thought Ewen McKenzie was excellent. He came in to Queensland at a really tumultuous time and was able to transform us – not so much technically but through the attitude and mindset he helped instil.” Almost in the same breath he mentions Michael Cheika, who recalled Horwill to the Test arena this year. “You want to play for him … he’s excellent at that. I don’t know how he keeps doing it but you just want to run through brick walls. He really made guys buy in to a clear team identity. That’s the most important thing for any coach.”
Fair enough, but what about Eddie? His strengths, reckons Horwill, lie in different areas. “Eddie’s a career coach … he certainly has a real solid knowledge of the game and a good eye for detail. He’s very, very good at creating gameplans based on the weaknesses of other teams and individual players. Speak to the South African guys who worked with him at the 2007 World Cup and they say the same thing. He’d pick out little things about players and his work ethic is unquestionable.”
Jones the tactical brain versus Cheika’s all-for-one musketeers: next June’s England tour to Australia will be fascinating. The reunion between the two former Randwick players will, according to Horwill, give England a precise indicator of where they sit. “England has the talent – I’ve seen that in the Premiership already, you’ve got some fantastic players. It’s just about having belief in their ability and being on the same page. I definitely think Eddie can do that, he is a very good coach. He’ll drive guys very hard and make them work, there’s no doubt about that.”
Horwill, still technically eligible to play for the Wallabies as an overseas-based player having won 61 caps, is also an expert on the subject of foreigners coaching national teams. He was the Wallabies captain during the New Zealander Robbie Deans’s stint as head coach, an appointment that did not meet with universal local approval. “The public always picked on the fact Robbie wasn’t an Australian, probably unfairly so. He was a good coach and at the time we went for the best one available based on his success with the Crusaders. That’s what England wanted to do and that automatically narrows the size of the pool.”
There is, nevertheless, an antipodean sting in the tail. “Back home we’d very rarely have a national team not coached by an Australian. We’re such a proud sporting country.”
Having been replaced as Wallabies captain after Australia’s losing 2013 Lions series, Horwill can also empathise with his new club-mate Chris Robshaw as Jones ponders a future beyond England’s World Cup disappointment. “I don’t know Chris well but he is a pretty level-headed guy. He understands that change can be a good and a bad thing. He is still England captain but in the end you’ve just got to control what you can control. You can’t worry about all the exterior stuff: with social media everyone’s got an opinion and feels it necessary to air it. All you can control is getting out on the field, trying to play well and enjoying your rugby.”
Horwill, now resident in Putney, is proof that the dark times do not last indefinitely. Since returning to the ranks – he narrowly failed to make the World Cup squad having been outstanding in Australia’s win over New Zealand in August – the lock also concedes life is less stressful. “As captain I’d be thinking: ‘Was there anything more I could have done, it’s my fault we lost?’ You still feel that responsibility as a player but you don’t feel that overall ownership. I just wanted to take it on behalf of everyone and let others not have to deal with it. That can take a toll after a while.”
Hence his visible enthusiasm for his latest adventure, after a lifetime spent in Brisbane, with a starting role against Exeter on Saturday his next challenge. “I wanted to do something different and you can’t play rugby until you’re 50 or 60, even though Nick Easter’s trying to push that theory. Everyone’s telling me: ‘Just wait until January and February when the weather turns and it’s a little bit darker.’ I can’t remember playing a single wet game in Super Rugby last year.” For more than one London-based Aussie migrant, a wintry voyage of discovery awaits.
