Eddie Jones named Australia head coach: will he come back to haunt England?

Eddie Jones: ‘Freddy in a tracksuit’?

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published 19 January 2023

When Eddie Jones was sacked as England’s head coach last month, some assumed he’d move on to some “lavishly paid sinecure in the United States”, said Oliver Brown in The Daily Telegraph. Instead, the 62-year-old has “detonated a bomb under the Rugby Football Union” by announcing he’s “going home”. A “mere 40 days after his defenestration at Twickenham”, the Australian struck a five-year deal to replace Dave Rennie as Australia’s head coach.

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So, “like Freddy Krueger in a tracksuit”, said Robert Kitson in The Guardian, Jones is set to return “to haunt English dreams”, starting this autumn at the Rugby World Cup in France, where there’s every chance England will face the Wallabies in the knockout stages. Australia, it’s true, are a struggling side, having been “decimated” by injuries in recent months. But if Jones has specialised at one thing in his career, it’s at “expertly springing the trap” against supposedly superior teams. He did this with Australia against New Zealand in 2003; with Japan against South Africa in 2015; and with England against the All Blacks in 2019. Should he repeat the trick in France, the RFU’s decision to sack him would immediately seem like “one of the all-time great corporate howlers”.

Jones is not to be underestimated, said Owen Slot in The Times. After he joined a beleaguered England in 2015, they “won 18 games in succession”, equalling the men’s world record for a winning streak in toptier international rugby. He’s bound to give the Wallabies a “bounce”, which is why the World Cup is such a mouthwatering prospect. But even if Jones is a success in the short-term, that doesn’t mean the RFU were wrong to sack him. Jones excels at turnarounds, but has never been as good at sustaining success. “He builds successful campaigns, he doesn’t build empires.” And last autumn it was abundantly clear that his “England empire had collapsed”.