The outsider: England coach Eddie Jones ready for Rugby World Cup showdown with homeland that divorced him
There can be few matches that stir as many emotions for Eddie Jones as tomorrow’s.
On Saturday in Oita, Jones will lead his adopted nation of England into a Rugby World Cup quarter-final against his native Australia, a tie being staged in his mother’s homeland, Japan.
But the match is more than just a collision of his heritage. It is a chance for the 59-year-old England head coach to exact some long-awaited revenge on Australia, with whom he has endured a turbulent relationship.
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Born in Tasmania to an Aussie father and Japanese-American mother, Jones struggled to fit in growing up and it is clear, having coached both Australia and Japan since, that it is a burden he still carries.
“I never fit in,” Jones told the LifeTimes podcast earlier this year. “I was half-Asian – or half-Chinese, as you were known back then. Most Australians didn’t know what Japanese was. When I go to Japan, I’m half-Australian. In England, I’m a foreigner.”
It was through sport, and rugby in particular, that Jones found his place in a predominantly white Australian society.
Ridiculed
He played alongside his adversary tomorrow, Australia coach Michael Cheika, for rugby club Randwick in Sydney, and later New South Wales.
An 80kg hooker, he never represented the Wallabies – his sharp tongue was his best asset – but perhaps this stoked his lofty ambitions for the top job.
Nonetheless, it was enough to earn him a contract through to the 2007 tournament.
He began his coaching career at Randwick in 1994 and became Australia head coach in 2001. He lead them to within minutes of claiming the World Cup at home in 2003 only to be undone by Jonny Wilkinson’s last-minute drop goal for England.
Australian media had ridiculed Jones’s failures, with predecessor Alan Jones repeatedly calling for him to be sacked. One of the most capped Wallabies of all-time, David Campese, didn’t disagree.
Traitor
In 2005, though, things began to turn sour. Jones’s Australia lost seven straight Tests, which became eight in nine after a 24-22 defeat to Wales in December – the last match before he was sacked.
Jones’s rebuttal that losing was good did not sit well with the Australian Rugby Union (ARU) or the public, but it is a claim that his track record backs up, if it didn’t at the time.
England’s horror run in 2018 saw them lose five successive Test matches, but he has since reshaped and galvanised the side, and they are now three wins away from winning the World Cup.
It was a similar story for the World Cup-winning South Africa side of 2007, with whom Jones was a consultant coach. They lost eight games in the 18 months leading up to that tournament.
The Springboks job was also an appointment that pushed him further away from his Australian roots. He was branded a “traitor” by ARU officials and players for aiding one of their main rivals at a tournament that saw the Wallabies lose to England in the quarter-finals.
It was a term later used by Aussie pundits on England’s 3-0 series win in Australia in 2016, which saw Jones clash with former players and media over the coverage of the visitors.
“It was a result of Australia divorcing me,” Jones said of his decision to coach abroad. “The first place I went after was England. I came to Saracens and loved it, loved the rugby, the environment. I thought there’s no real reason for me to go back to Australia, I’ve done most things I can do there.”
Revenge
Since joining England he has a 6-0 record against Cheika’s Wallabies. Games between the two are as much defined by the pre-game chat than performances on the pitch and this week has been no different.
In fact it started last week when Jones praised the “typhoon Gods” for giving them a two-week rest ahead of the quarter-final. Cheika retorted that England “better go out there and win” then.
Despite a concerted effort to rein in the back and forth this week, Cheika couldn’t resist a few jibes, quipping “I don’t want to be lucky or have the gods smile on me”.
He took a swipe at The Brighton Miracle, a film based on Jones’s 2015 Japan side, saying he was “not looking to make a movie or write a book”, and took aim at the decision to bring Canberra Raiders coach Ricky Stuart into the England camp, calling it “weird”.
Victory for England would all but ensure the end of Cheika’s tenure, while for Jones this weekend’s match also presents an opportunity to exact the sweetest of revenge on Rugby Australia.
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The ultimate gratification would of course be to win the World Cup and see through this four-year project successfully. Doing so in the birthplace of his mother, while beating the Wallabies along the way, are mere bonuses.
The real highlight, then, would be toppling the All Blacks. And on that, if nothing else, Jones and his countrymen can agree.
Main image credit: Getty