Eddie Jones and Warren Gatland seem so intent on doing things differently that one can only feel for the waiter during their dinner together on Friday. Their approaches to their respective World Cup campaigns are so at odds one wonders if each is doing it simply to bait the other.
Wales are tried and tested. They are grand slam champions, exuding a calm authority and a certain affability. Gatland has adopted a straight- forward approach in his dealings with the press and made it clear this week that he has named his strongest side for Sunday’s opening World Cup warm-up match against England at Twickenham because he wants to extend Wales’s winning sequence to 15, which would install them as the world No 1 ranked team for the first time. Furthermore, Gatland reiterated that he intends to name his World Cup squad after three of their warm-up matches, much closer to the official deadline.
Contrast that with England and it is plain to see that tensions are running high. How else to explain that, while Wales were tucked away in the Swiss Alps, England’s lack of discipline off the field surfaced again with an altercation involving Ben Te’o and Mike Brown leading to both being axed from this weekend’s squad? Or that some players this past week have been in even frostier moods than usual. Jones likes to keep everyone in camp on their toes – so highly strung it is perhaps inevitable that every now and then someone snaps.
The increase in management jargon – the process, the learnings – only adds to a sense of a camp on edge and it has reached the stage where kick-off cannot come quickly enough. The players certainly seem to agree and clearly there is an anxiousness to get on with things on Sunday afternoon. As the full-back Elliot Daly explained: “Ken Owens [the Wales hooker] said it in the paper the other day … there are only so many times you can run up and down a pitch without playing rugby. Everyone just wants to get out there because it’s 12 weeks since we last played.”
The players will not admit it but certainly there is a strange dynamic for England on Sunday with Jones set to announce his final 31-man squad for the World Cup on Monday. The experimental nature of the side he has selected would suggest this is a final audition for a number of players – Gatland certainly thinks so having claimed that Wales want to “spoil their party and make Monday difficult for them in terms of selection”.
It was a pointed remark considering Jones had talked about spoiling Wales’s party during the Six Nations but truth be told, injuries notwithstanding, he will know his squad by now, even if the players themselves do not.
So what, then, to make of his XV? The suggestion he is “running scared” of Wales is wide of the mark and England are certain to head to Cardiff next Saturday with first-team stars such as Owen Farrell, Maro Itoje and Manu Tuilagi restored to the starting XV. And for all that Willi Heinz’s late emergence has caused a stir, Jones’s first-choice team is relatively settled.
Anthony Watson’s return to the side – and the extent to which he interchanges with Daly – will be one of the more intriguing aspects of England’s performance because the three late injury-enforced changes deny Ruaridh McConnochie a debut and perhaps even more significant, Jones the chance to see Sam Underhill and Tom Curry dovetail as the two flankers. That in turn does mean Lewis Ludlam wins his first cap and, while it seems late in the day to be handing Test debuts to future World Cup squad members, it also pays to remember that in 2003, when Wales came to Twickenham for the first of their warm-up matches, precisely none of the England side they encountered started the first match in Australia.
It is also worth bearing in mind that warm-up matches will not win World Cups but can go some way towards losing them and England’s lacklustre defeat by France four years ago – a torrid performance salvaged only by a thrilling late cameo from Danny Cipriani – and more significantly the management’s reaction to it was the first sign that cracks were starting to appear.
For Jones, however, the most pressing issue is somewhat different, for it was after England’s last outing, the second-half capitulation against Scotland at the end of a middling Six Nations campaign, that he spoke of his squad’s greatest problem and his confidence he could fix it. There was no doubt in Jones’s mind he would find an answer to their continuing ability to clear their heads in adversity or, as he put it, “we have some hand grenades in the back of a jeep, and sometimes they go off when there’s a lot of pressure”. His reasoning was that “we are going to have the players for three months, which I’ve never had before”.
However much the Anglo-Welsh rivalry matters, Sunday’s match will not provide conclusive answers as to whether Jones has succeeded – warm-ups never tend to be so revealing – but it may just offer a few clues if one looks closely.
