Six Nations 2016 Scotland vs England: Is Eddie Jones the most brutal man in rugby?

Those who have worked with him would attest that the new England coach is uncompromising, doesn’t suffer small talk and demands total commitment from his players. It’s a style that can backfire, but more often than not it brings success

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They call it the Eddie Jones “stink eye” and you don’t want to be getting it. The right eyebrow is raised and it denotes that he has seen or heard or decided something about you that has left him less than pleased. There will be consequences.

It is not always an evidence-based assessment that the new England coach makes. There was a very uncomfortable start to his first pre-match press conference within the grounds of the squad’s Surrey base, two days ago, when it became immediately evident that, for reasons as yet unclear, he does not much care for English television interviews. His answers were monosyllabic, cold as stone and he wore a look that could kill for the first few minutes. If you are lucky, he will wait until you have left the room before eviscerating you. Joe Roff, the back who played for Jones in the Australia team, tells me about the psychologist who was brought in to offer some insight as part of the review of Jones’ disastrous first season at the Australian club side, the Brumbies, in 1998. “When the guy had finished, Eddie led the conversation,” Roff relates. “He said: ‘This is bullshit.’”

Delve and analyse and dissect as much as you want: the words that you keep coming back to about Jones and his management style are “brutal” and “nasty”. The significant caveat being that his capacity to go to the core of the problem in a team or a match entitles him to make his thumping, uncompromising assessments about who is failing to step up to his mark.

When Jones left the Brumbies there was a collective sigh of relief in many quarters at the club. “Most of them hated him,” says one source who, like many who tell it as it really is about the 56-year-old, does not want to be named. “As a young man I don’t think he said ‘thank you’ very often.” By driving them so hard, he had also taken the club to a high point in their history by 2001: the first Super 12 title claimed by a side outside of New Zealand. “He’d blow other coaches out by the standards he set,” says Roff. “I’ve never been involved in a programme I had such confidence in. Every ‘t’ crossed and ‘i’ dotted. He just didn’t have a lot of empathy for substandard activities. He didn’t pander to friendships and bureaucracy.”

It is not hard to trace the biographical thread which has produced a work ethic so punishing that even the journalists Jones has most respect for are those whom he perceives to put in the hours and hard yards. (“I read the papers,” he said on Thursday – and he does.) The philosophy is rooted in a tough and uncompromising upbringing: the south-eastern Sydney suburb of Chifley, known for the Long Bay jail and swathes of social housing, in his case. It translated on to a rugby field when the Matraville Sports High School he attended happened to fall within the catchment area of Randwick – a powerhouse; Australia’s finest club side. That’s where he found himself fighting with all he had to hold out Phil Kearns as hooker, and knowing full well that if you can make it there, a route to the New South Wales set-up, and ultimately the Wallabies, might lie ahead.

He – the 80kg (12.5st) diminutive son of an Australian and American/Japanese parents was seriously, hopelessly, up against it, with 120kg Tommy Lawton ahead of him in the queue of contemporary hookers with ambition. He never got a look-in at international level as a player because he was a “yappie little scrapper; a fox terrier when they were always looking for an Alsatian,” as one contemporary puts it. But what he lacked in stature, he made up for by fighting, scratching and most often sledging. Sledging to make your eyes water and of a kind that few could match.

Randwick were never easy to beat, with David Campese and the Ella brothers in their number, but the joke in those days – which pre-dated scrutiny of off-the-ball events – was how you would “get Eddie Jones” in the last 20 minutes, if you knew that you were not going to win. “He stirred it,” says the contemporary. “I remember one semi-final, when Eddie was gobbing it as the scrum was being tacked. We said, ‘If we do lose, we take no prisoners’, and that last 20 minutes got pretty messy. That was a compliment to Eddie. When you’d left the field it was like nothing had happened and you’d have a beer.”

There was very much more to Jones’ rugby than the sledging, of course: clinically clean, low tackles which he whipped out of and some remarkable handling. His low centre of gravity helped. But it was when he made his first break into coaching that his unflinching directness proved questionable.

Jones’ inheritance was a healthy one at the Brumbies, in his first serious role after completing the schoolboy coaching circuit. An empowered group of players had been set up to win by Rod Macqueen – the coach who had just achieved a second-place finish in Super Rugby and been recruited by the Wallabies. Yet six games in it had gone so badly that he was one match away from the sack. Those involved at that time suggest that he, the rookie, waded in “boots and all”, as one puts it, with too much to say, when that group of players, who had been professional for two years, actually knew more than him.

Roff suggests that Jones’ ability to turn things around from the 10th-place finish that year to fifth in 1999, second in 2000 and then champions in his final year at the helm, stemmed from a capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism and never being blinded by ego. “He was one of those coaches who looks inward,” Roff says. But another witness to that period suggests that Jones realised he had to back off and give the players more room to breathe. Perhaps he actually assimilated the words of that psychologist he’d dismissed.

There was a sense for years in Australia – even after Jones had taken the national team to the 2003 World Cup final, destroying Clive Woodward with words along the way in press conferences which were a part of his arsenal – that his accomplishments were not so remarkable. With the national side, as at the Brumbies, it was Macqueen’s successful team he inherited and many will tell you that he was riding on the older man’s coat-tails. They’ll also say it helped him to have Glen Ella as his sidekick in the national set-up. “Ella laughs all the time and Jones is dynamic and aggressive: the crazy Tasmanian devil,” says one source. “They were just a great double act.” The jury always seemed to be out on him and the “mind games” model of coaching he employed so implacably – digging out players through the media, in training sessions or review meetings.

It actually took success with a squad schooled on the other side of the Indian Ocean to convince the Australians that this guy was an operator. Some will tell you that Jones’ part in helping Jake White to lift a fading South Africa team to win the 2007 World Cup, this time defeating England in a final, was his biggest hit of all.

Those South Africans really loved the kill-dog in Jones. Captain John Smit tells of asking the Aussie how he rated the set plays out of 10, after he had just viewed their first training session for the tournament. “If I’m being generous, about four,” Jones replied. But Smit marvelled at the way Jones “fixed small things like running lines and fine-tuned here and there our back-line play”. And the way he transformed the game of fly-half Butch James, who was running the show by the time the side reached the final, at which stage, “Jake thought Butch was God!”

Jones appears far more capable of subjugating his ego than football’s practitioners of the brutal management style – such as Jose Mourinho, far more comparable to the incoming Manchester City coach, Pep Guardiola, who Jones said this week would be welcome to visit Pennyhill Park.

White, the South Africa coach whose idea it was to bring Jones into the 2007 fold, remembers things not going to plan in the first game of the tournament against Samoa. “I turned to him and asked him: ‘Eddie, what’s happening here?’ His response, at a very tense time, made me laugh: ‘I don’t know, mate. I’ve never been in this position. Let’s hope they’re in the lead by the time we get to the shed and then we can sort it out.’ I loved that about Eddie. He was no smart-arse who had every answer.” The Boks won 59-7.

The Jones philosophy of management is fine for as long as the wheels are turning but it can unravel incredibly quickly when they start to uncouple. Coaches who opt for the more common strategy of “playing a straight bat, squeezing a bit here and there,” as one puts it, can perhaps expect to be cut more slack. It means that Jones’ achievements have been punctuated by some spectacularly abrupt slumps. He was released by Australia in 2005 after losing eight of his final nine games. He left Queensland Reds after finishing bottom on the 2007 Super 14, including a record 92-3 defeat by the Bulls and 96-0 mauling by Queensland. It was a disaster there; a mutiny by the end. His time at Saracens ended early, six years ago, after a falling out with the board. All more echoes of the way things have collapsed in the past for Mourinho.

It was a virtuoso Jones display at Pennyhill this week: fast, slick, droll and so off-the-cuff that you grieved for Stuart Lancaster with that Collins A4 diary – Mid-term 2015-16 – he always carried around. The Jones machine-gun answers – encompassing such topics as Australian convicts, Einstein’s definition of insanity, Prince Harry’s house and his own protégé George Smith getting his “head knocked off” in training at Wasps – were all laced with copious use of “mate”. It was window-dressing of a sure-footed, unsentimental operator for whom the media is a device to be exploited; bent to the pursuit of success.

The very significant questions of England’s academies and next generation, which so absorbed Lancaster, were not on the agenda. “I’m not discussing that,” Jones said. “I’m a national team coach. I don’t discuss academies.”

It’s the twinkling smile you will be looking at today but it will not all be milk and honey for his players or those who chronicle their fortunes. “When you get to know him, you’ll know, mate,” an Australian colleague warns. “Give him a hard time in a column or a story and he’ll know and you’ll know he knows. You’ll get the stink eye.”

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KEEPING UP WITH JONES EDDIE COACHING CAREER

1994 Randwick

1995-96 Tokai University

1996 Japan (assistant)

1997 Suntory Sungoliath

1998-01 Brumbies

2001-05 Australia

2006 Saracens (consultant)

2007 Reds

2007 South Africa (assistant)

2007-09 Saracens

2009-12 Suntory Sungoliath

2012-15 Japan

2015 England

• Led Australia to 2003 World Cup final and 2001 Tri Nations.
• Helped South Africa to 2007 World Cup as assistant coach.
• Won Super 12 title with Brumbies and the All-Japan Championship and Top Leagues with Suntory.
• Coached Japan to memorable World Cup pool-stage victory over South Africa last year.