England vs Ireland: Dylan Hartley happy to make sacrifices to lead Club England

There’s a different feeling in the red-rose camp under Jones, with more time for team bonding – and fewer trips home to see the family. The captain tells Chris Hewett about the pros, and cons, of the new regime

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England’s elite rugby players are not exactly slumming it under the stern stewardship of Eddie Jones: their baronial team base in super-swanky Surrey has not become prefabricated all of a sudden; the wine list would still make the average hedge fund manager think twice about ordering a second bottle, even on expenses. But the atmosphere is different somehow. There are no more days off, for a start. It must feel like a real job.

Let Dylan Hartley tell it how it is, with reference to how it was. “I don’t drive back home to Northampton for a few hours in the middle of the week any longer, so I can’t get out of Thursday training because my muscles have seized up on the trip back down,” says the newly appointed captain, now two games into a career as an international skipper that rather crept up on him by surprise. “Instead, we stay together for a ‘recovery day’. We go swimming, go to stretch classes and spend time with each other, which is good for breaking down barriers and building relationships.

“Eddie wants to create a club culture here as well as an exclusive environment, and we’re all behind it. But it’s a sacrifice too. I have a six-month-old baby at home and I’m not there as much as I’d like.

“Joe Marler has a new-born, so it must be even harder for him. But this is what we’ve committed ourselves to doing. If you don’t want to be here, you can always put up your hand and say so.”

There is a strong impression that if things go badly for England over the remainder of this Six Nations Championship – if certain experienced players fall short of the head coach’s expectations, which are generally on the high side – the decision may be taken for them. Not even Hartley feels secure, with the in-form Saracens hooker Jamie George challenging ever harder for a starting place.

“It’s pretty rosy around here because we’ve won our first two games, but at the same time it’s pretty challenging,” Hartley continues. “Eddie has his own way of doing things. One day, he’ll ask after my daughter; the next, he’ll tell me I trained like shit. Then, the day after, it’s a case of ‘how’s your wife?’

“What you see is what you get, I think. He’s straight up and down. So I’m always aware that I have to earn Eddie’s trust by continuing to play well and demand that everyone else does the same.

“As for Jamie, I know he’s snapping at my heels. He cut that nice line and delivered that offload from the floor for Owen Farrell’s try in Rome, didn’t he? And of course the camera panned straight to me, watching from the bench. Funny how that always seems to happen.”

For all the pressure generated by his new role, Hartley seems at one with the world – a heart-warming development for a player with God-given talent and a weakness for unholy excess who has not always succeeded in maximising the one at the expense of the other. It cannot be easy for so tempestuous a competitor, treading the thin line dividing the acceptable from the inadmissible, but on the most recent available evidence he is making a fist of it, so to speak.

It will be fascinating to see how he rubs along with his opposite number and rival captain Rory Best when Ireland visit Twickenham this evening. They share some history: Hartley picked up one of his shorter bans – a mere two weeks – for his role in an entanglement with Best during a Heineken Cup match between Northampton and Ulster at Franklin’s Gardens in 2012, and it was the man from County Armagh who bagged the New Zealand-born forward’s place on the Lions tour of Australia a few months later after the latter treated the international referee Wayne Barnes to some verbals of the Anglo-Saxon variety midway through a Premiership final and, following the inevitable sending-off, was suspended to within an inch of his rugby-playing life.

He has little to say about Best in particular. While Jones, a hooker himself back in the day, still takes mischievous delight in watching two No 2s go after each other in unarmed union combat, the practitioners themselves tend to be fully paid-up members of the front-row branch of the Mutual Appreciation Society. Some of these expressions of respect are patently for public consumption only, but most of them are sincere, so far as they go.

Of more interest to Hartley is the threat posed by the Irish pack as a whole, unfamiliar as it is in some areas in the absence of Iain Henderson, Peter O’Mahony and Sean O’Brien, among others. “This is a proper Test match,” he says, drawing a firm distinction between the opening matches against Scotland and Italy and the arrival of the reigning champions. “Not that I’d have said that before the tournament, because we were playing an in-form Scotland away from home after just 10 days together and then had the potential banana-skin in Rome.

“Ireland may have a couple missing, but we’ve been preparing for the best possible team they can bring over here. And that means putting 90 per cent of the focus on ourselves.

“Yes, you can analyse patterns and trends in the opposition game, but what matters to us is maintaining our own standards. For example, we definitely want to be better at the line-out after losing four on our own throw in Italy. The problem there was more down to individual error than any system malfunction: I threw one not straight, someone missed a call, another one was dropped, that kind of thing.

“But whatever the reason, we can’t let it happen again. This week of all weeks, it has to be double-top in that area.”

And to that end, there will be precious little theatre before the game – no walking through the Twickenham crowd en route to the dressing room; no soaking-up of the atmosphere.

“I just want to get into the stadium and get on with the job,” Hartley says, clearly unimpressed by the thought of continuing the “look at us” antics in the West Car Park that marked England’s approach to home games last year. “We know the support is there for us – we can see it from the bus. The way I look at it, we can walk through the crowd afterwards. When we’ve won.”