Having sold Australia ‘a dream’ in 2023, the Wallabies are still picking up the pieces two years on from Jones’s arrival and swift departure
MELBOURNE — It is only two years since Rugby Australia were crowing over their masterplan for Eddie Jones to be the king of this British & Irish Lions series.
As head coach of the Wallabies, Jones would feast on the bones of the Lions before roaring on to the men’s World Cup to be staged in this country in 2027.
“Eddie the saviour” in a five-year deal for his second stint in charge would be carried shoulder-high by an adoring public after a Lions third Test and World Cup final both played out in Sydney where he grew up and learnt the game. Or something like that, anyway.
Instead, Jones’s return in 2023, after England had ended his rollercoaster six years in charge at Twickenham, was a disaster.
Rugby Australia got rid of a good head coach in Dave Rennie to bring back Jones, who within months was dissing the structure of Australia in Super Rugby and writing a shopping list of rugby-league talent – Joseph Suaalii is the only one who has signed to date.
He left trusted stalwarts including Michael Hooper and Quade Cooper out of what proved a calamitous World Cup in France in September 2023, when the Wallabies were dumped out 40-6 by Wales – yes, Wales, who were about to go on an 18-match losing streak until they won away to… Japan, now coached by Jones, earlier this month.
And that segues into the greatest cloud on the Jones horizon: the story in the Sydney Morning Herald during the World Cup, that Jones continues to deny, of him clandestinely interviewing for the Japan head-coach role before the tournament started – a job he eventually took up six weeks after quitting in the wake of Australia’s elimination.
So how much is the current Wallaby team – ranked sixth in the world under Kiwi head coach Joe Schmidt, and beaten by the Lions in last Saturday’s first Test in Brisbane – haunted by the ghost of Jones?
The i Paper has spoken to two well-informed figures. Morgan Turinui was a centre for Australia whose 20 caps came during Jones’s first spell as the country’s head coach, from 2003 to 2005. The two men also came through the same Randwick club in Sydney, and Turinui is now a top rugby pundit for Stan Sport.
And Tom Decent, the sports journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald who broke the Jones-to-Japan story, and battled through attempts by Jones – for which he has recently apologised – to discredit his work.
1. How disruptive was Jones?
“He was designed to be disruptive and to find something positive out of the disruption – and it went the other way,” says Turinui.
“It was a big risk and the risk didn’t come close to coming off.
“Australian rugby needed improvement; it still does. There’s a generation of kids paying the price for the way we churned a previous generation. We churn and burn coaches, too. Whether it needed a five-year reset under Eddie was open to opinion.
“Maybe you just needed to buckle down and keep building and be more collaborative. Going from five Super Rugby teams down to four was important; that’s been done. And there is a bit of truth behind Eddie’s version of events, where he saw that it wasn’t going to work with Rugby Australia. It could have gotten worse if he’d stayed.”
Decent says: “Eddie and I had some tos and fros at press conferences, etc. I think the fact he apologised to me personally was about as good as you’re going to get with Eddie. We can agree to disagree, and I think we’re both at peace with that.
“I know that privately he was frustrated at the standard of those guys that he eventually got for that Test season, albeit briefly before the World Cup. The Wales game was just comically bad – as big a car crash as Australian rugby has ever seen.
“But I don’t think it meant he was a bad coach. He was appointed in January of that year and asked to have the team humming for September – a group he had no say over before that year. It just snowballed and it ended in tears.”
Turinui: “I think you have to realise we are cursed by the turn-of-the-century team [Australia won the 1999 World Cup, beat the Lions in 2001 and reached the 2003 World Cup final]. That’s where our expectation will always be.
“Would the Wallabies be in a better place if they’d just stuck with Dave Rennie, and then Joe Schmidt to come in and build off that? Possibly, yes. What we’ve seen with Joe is a logical improvement over a 12-month period, which is the opposite of what we saw with Eddie.”
2. What has needed mending?
Turinui says: “The cost was in some individual players. [Centre] Len Ikitau is an automatic selection now, when he wasn’t under Eddie. [Fly-half] Carter Gordon, if he’d hung around, he’d be another couple of years down the track, and vying with Noah Lolesio, with Tom Lynagh and Ben Donaldson behind them.”
Instead Gordon, who was surprisingly picked then dropped like a stone by Jones at the World Cup, left for rugby league, as did the flying wing Mark Nawaqanitawase, while a third top player, 31-cap back Jordan Petaia, quit to try for the NFL.
And with Lolesio injured, Schmidt threw Lynagh in as a raw No 10 against the Lions last week.
Decent says: “Picking young guys at the World Cup was a real roll of the dice, and there was a frustration in doing that if he [Jones] wasn’t going to see it out. Carter Gordon thought Australian rugby was a basket case after that.
“But Angus Bell, Nick Frost, Ben Donaldson – the guys who got experience in that World Cup – I think it will serve them in good stead. And it wouldn’t be a surprise if Nawaqanitawase came back for 2027.”
3. How do the Aussie rugby public feel now?
Jones is striving to stay a part of the conversation. He has a column for an overseas rugby website, a few UK appearances lined up via Zoom on Talksport, a podcast of his own trying to put the rugby world to rights, and of course the Japan job.
“It seems like there’s a lot of people here wanting to move on from Eddie,” says Decent, “given that he was so loud and brash and told us how Australia would win the Bledisloe, win the World Cup, ‘smash and grab’ – all that stuff. They wanted to believe in the dream he sold. And everyone would have let him have that World Cup – if he’d stuck around until 2027.”
Turinui says: “You know, Eddie coached a lot of us, so there’ll always be that mentor relationship, and it hasn’t been destroyed – but it’s damaged. There’s that emotional reaction in people, they’re angry at him for letting us down. But it’s a hard one. He’s not a villain, he’s not a hero; he’s a human.
“Eddie brought the Japanese under-23s to Coffs Harbour in April and he couldn’t have been more welcoming to local coaches, kids, talent, the community – he got out and about, was asked about 2023 and put his hand up about mistakes he made. He came to Randwick, where we’re a little biased because he is one of our own, but we also have a deep care for the Wallabies, and he was face to face with a few thousand people, trying to repair his relationship within the game.”
Decent: “I think in that little pocket of the world, people have happy to forgive Eddie for what happened. If he comes back for the 2027 World Cup, and he’s with Japan playing against Australia, I’m not sure the reception will be as great.”