Six Nations 2016: England vs Ireland - Eddie Jones compares new boy Maro Itoje to South Africa’s Eben Etzebeth

Red-rose coach holds highly promising lock back from the media - to avoid headlines - but throws him in against Irish

Maro Itoje enjoys himself during training with England (Getty)

Maro Itoje has no option but to do his talking on the pitch, because he is not being allowed to open his mouth anywhere else – least of all in public. “I don’t want him built up into a headline before he’s a headline,” said the head coach Eddie Jones, explaining why the most discussed player in England has been kept under wraps. Jones then predicted, in the very next breath, that Itoje would turn out to be a “more athletic version of Eben Etzebeth”, the South African lock widely regarded as the best in the world. Which was, of course, well worth a headline.

Itoje is a confident and highly articulate young sportsman who, having been picked for his first red-rose start, might have expected to find himself sitting at the top table in front of a battery of cameras, microphones, tape recorders and every other variety of media hardware. Instead, he was confined to the shadows. It would be easier to ask a pertinent question or two of Lord Lucan than grab a few words with the latest member of the England engine room.

But having picked the Saracens youngster for Saturday’s big Six Nations game with Ireland at Twickenham, the head coach was in no mood to make a song and dance about it – apart, that is, from comparing him with an elder and better of Etzebeth’s stature.

“I’ll tell you why Maro doesn’t talk to you,” Jones commented when asked about Itoje’s uncanny impersonation of the Invisible Man. “I want him to be a great rugby player and I have a duty of care towards him. I want this kid to play 70 or 80 Tests. He’s good enough to do that but I want him to earn his stripes. When he’s played a massive game for England – when he’s won us a significant Test match as well as all his line-outs – I’ll let you talk to him all week from Monday to Friday. He doesn’t deserve media exposure right now. Why? Because he’s done nothing.”

Well, up to a point. If Jones has seen enough of Itoje to make a comparison with the man from Cape Town – “The best left-hand side lock in the game is Etzebeth, but Maro has better jumping skills and if he can develop the same mongrel in his carrying and tackling, he’ll be world-class” – he must have done something somewhere along the line. There again, the training ground and the Test arena are very different places.

The mention of “mongrel” prompted another illuminating exchange. Asked whether it was possible for a coach to maximise a player’s aggressive instinct, Jones responded by saying: “Everyone has it somewhere inside them. The question is how far you have to dig to get it out.

“You hear stories from New Zealand about the All Blacks. Take Rodney So’oialo [a formidable No 8 from the recent past]. He was a Samoan whose family arrived in the country with nothing. There were eight brothers, the father and the mother, all living in a room this big. The only way out was to play rugby. So Rodney runs to school every day, five kilometres there and five back, and he develops this fantastic aerobic capacity. Sometimes, it’s circumstances that bring out the mongrel. Sometimes the team environment does it; sometimes it’s one inspirational person. Itoje has it. He just has to find it.”

Might that prove just a little difficult for a Harrow-educated degree student suddenly earning top-dollar wages in the five-star surroundings of England’s country hotel training base? Jones understood the direction of travel. “Go to the car park,” he said by way of acknowledgement. “There are no Vauxhall Vivas there.”

Then, after a brief pause for thought, he added: “Are people too comfortable? I think they are at the moment. My job is to make sure they’re not comfortable, because that’s the only way we’re going to change the things that have happened to English rugby over the last period of time. But I can’t just bang heads all the time, because that way I’ll lose people. I have to find a way with each individual.”

That process has been under way for almost three months, but Jones accepts that this meeting with the reigning Six Nations champions will take things up a level. England have not set foot on the Twickenham greensward since the World Cup and they dare not mess up on their return.

“The stakes are raised,” Jones conceded. “Scotland and Italy are always tough games, but Ireland have consistently been in the top six of the rankings. They may have dropped a bit lately, but we’re now playing one of the best teams in the world, rather than teams who haven’t been among the best. I hope our performance will be better than in the last two games.” Another pause. “Actually, I know it will be better.”