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RUGBY UNION | MATTHEW SYED
Why Eddie Jones is turning into rugby’s Dominic Cummings
Matthew Syed
When England were near the end of their streak of 18 victories under their new head coach Eddie Jones, I attended a leadership conference at which the Australian was one of the headline speakers. I am not sure I have seen an audience quite as rapt, listening to a man who speaks with a disarmingly colloquial manner but is also capable of ranging across philosophy, leadership and life.
Across 30 or so minutes, he talked about how his years as a teacher had helped him to unlock the best in people. He talked about how a friend — a general manager of a luxury hotel — had helped him to grasp the importance of treating everyone with courtesy and respect. He talked about how people reach their own form of greatness when they are liberated from fear.
Jones also spoke about his own journey as a person: learning about fortitude and self-reliance as a mixed-race boy in predominantly white Australia; the stroke in 2013 that had helped him to find religion; how his time as a coach in Japan helped him to realise that an understanding of the history of a nation is crucial to shaping the mentality of a team.
Much of this is, I think, progressive and positive, and explains why his words made such an impact on the audience. This was a coach who wasn’t merely a keen student of rugby but also curious enough to ponder the broader context. Little wonder that many of the reviews of Jones in those early days held him up as representative of a new paradigm in sports leadership.
But the longer Jones has been at the helm, the more difficult it has been to square his rhetoric on the conference circuit with his actions as a coach. In a podcast appearance with Jake Humphrey and Damian Hughes last year, it almost felt like listening to a man living in a parallel universe to his team.
While talking about nurturing support staff, for example, Jones failed to note the unprecedented churn in everything from coaching to medical personnel since he took over. I have chatted to some of these people and they talked of Jones ripping into colleagues for seemingly no reason. Even those who admire Jones, not least for his detailed knowledge of the game and driven mentality, say the explosive gyrations in his mood destabilised the culture.
One might also note the contrast between Jones’s sentiments about understanding the history of nations where he coaches with his sentiments about some of those closest to him. “I always felt there was a slight hatred to the English,” one former staff member told this newspaper last year, “references to what we were like as a country. We’re this, we’re that.”
Then there is Jones’s rhetoric about taking personal responsibility for results while blaming those around him when things go wrong. Or consider his claim that as a teacher he realised the importance of empathy. This is the opposite of what insiders say of a man whose bulldozer approach is applied unsparingly to everyone: players and staff. As Danny Cipriani told me: “I have never worked with a coach who took less time to understand the players as human beings.”
Perhaps the most jarring thing of all is when Jones reaches for management-speak. He eulogises the importance of “critical candour” while shutting down dissent the moment there is something he doesn’t want to hear; he waxes lyrical about a “challenging environment” but is said to brook no challenge to himself; he talks of his mantra being “deep work” while treating his team like kids. As Dylan Hartley put it in his autobiography: “I went through a phase of dreading going away and I know other England players felt similarly . . . we were bonded by the ripples in Eddie’s character and constrained by the ludicrous convention that athletes, like Victorian children, should be seen and not heard.”
In short, Jones is a coach whose words and deeds seem to inhabit completely different hemispheres. In this sense, he reminds me a little of Dominic Cummings, who has written beautiful blog posts about the rule of law and co-operation but whose every action seems designed to obliterate co-operation and tear down established norms. It is as if Cummings’s musings on politics never make an impact on that furnace of insecurity and raw ambition we call character.
The former England captain Hartley said that he and other players “dreaded going away” with Jones and that they were bonded by his capricious behaviour
And isn’t this why, in the case of Jones, his career is such a rollercoaster, with occasional highs juxtaposed with crushing lows? When the stars align and he is able to bend everything to his will there is the fleeting appearance of excellence. One thinks, in particular, of the 2019 World Cup semi-final victory over New Zealand. He has also delivered a grand slam in 2016 and two other Six Nations titles, in 2017 and 2020. In between, though, it seems that morale is invariably broken on the rock of his ego, with the collateral damage expressed in woeful results. Fifth-placed finishes in the Six Nations in 2018 and 2021 represent scant return on the immense resources lavished upon Jones by the RFU.
And I suspect that however long Jones remains as England coach, this pattern will remain locked in place: a pattern of a squad and staff that always start out with high hopes but who become ever more exhausted by demands that seem less about winning and more about Jones’s insecurities. With some coaches, even amid the turbulence of international sport, you see the hallmarks of a journey, even if the team ultimately fail to reach the final destination. With Jones, though, it feels less like a journey and more like a psychodrama. He is one of those rare people where the grander his language, the smaller he seems.
I remember my sister getting me an England Rugby Annual for Christmas one year totally innocently.
