Six Nations 2016 Scotland vs England: Brian Smith - Eddie Jones’s team will be intense, efficient and hard to beat

Eddie has been talking the house down about developing a high-tempo running game in attack

WP Nel (centre) during the captain’s run at Murrayfield (Getty Images)

It is one of the impenetrable mysteries of sport: why do teams always get a positive bounce when a new coach arrives on the scene after a period of upheaval? There must be an explanation somewhere but, to the best of my knowledge, no one has yet come up with rugby’s version of e=mc2. Maybe Eddie Jones can solve the riddle. He’s certainly a man with a plan, so he might be a man with an equation too.

Whatever Eddie brings to an England group piecing itself back together after a pretty desperate World Cup campaign, he’s unlikely to do it quietly. He’s more likely to usher in an age of grand red-rose theatre. He’ll fight his corner to get what he wants out of everyone concerned – his players, his fellow coaches, his employers at Twickenham – and if he doesn’t get it there’ll be hell to pay. Why do I say this? Because I played against him in Australian club rugby back in the day and I know how driven a character he can be.

He was a hooker for Randwick, a working-class suburb of Sydney with a long tradition of success based on a sleeves-up, no-nonsense set of values that reflected life in the area. They had some brilliant backs at that time, including the Ella brothers and David Campese, but they were not so pretty up front. Eddie was very small in terms of physical stature, but very big on sledging. I can personally attest to the fact that it was easier to start a scrap with him than try to win the war of words.

The current Wallaby coach, Michael Cheika, is a pea from the same pod: he played for Randwick at the same time, had equal amounts of aggression to burn and was another of the club’s acknowledged masters of the verbal arts. Cheika was one of the main attractions at last year’s World Cup and I can see Eddie matching him as a high-profile figure. In a battle of the one-liners, he might even win.

Of course, the off-field entertainment must play second fiddle to the rugby England produce on the field, beginning against Scotland in Edinburgh today. The way I see it, the key words are “efficiency” and “intensity”. When Eddie is coaching at his best, his teams score highly on both counts and are very difficult to beat.

By recruiting Steve Borthwick and Paul Gustard as his assistants, he has maximised his chances of delivering in these crucial areas. Steve was England’s captain when I was on the back-room staff and he could probably have claimed two salaries: as well as being our key player in the line-out, he also coached it in training. He’s something of an obsessive when it comes to work – not quite at the Jonny Wilkinson level, but close enough – and he’ll make a mark in his current role. Remember the line-out howler at the end of the World Cup game against Wales? You won’t see anything like that now. Not on Steve’s watch.

I can also see what attracted Eddie about the Gustard defensive operation at Saracens – the so-called “wolf pack” system. Paul places enormous importance on line speed, but then so do a lot of other coaches. Where he’s clever is in his use of a back-rower between the half-backs on opposition ball. This protects the No 10 – not all outside-halves tackle as Wilkinson did – and gives the defensive line some additional width, allowing them to get off the line faster. Gustard has enjoyed a lot of success with this at club level and deserves his shot on the bigger stage.

Eddie has been talking the house down about developing a high-tempo running game in attack, but don’t expect England to move the ball from everywhere all the time. Generally speaking, his game plan can be broken into quarters. In the first 20 minutes, he seeks to play the game in the opposition half and pick up cheap points through penalties; in the second 20, he likes to up the pace and ask different questions of the opposition defence. At half-time, he’ll go through the vital stats – penalties, tackles, turnovers – and base his third-quarter approach on the available evidence. In the last 20 minutes, he’s all about impact off the bench.

That’s the theory, anyway. In practice, he faces a testing opening match at Murrayfield, which can be tricky at the best of times and is a really awkward place if people aren’t familiar with the grand plan. However, I don’t think the Scots are as good as people have made them out to be since their World Cup quarter-final against the Wallabies. Sure, they were on the end of a poor refereeing decision at the death, but Australia blew five tries that day.

If Scotland are hanging their hat on one close call against wasteful opponents, they’re kidding themselves. It was a crazy, one-in-20 kind of contest and they should see it for what it was.

To my mind, Ireland and Wales are the pedigree sides in this year’s tournament: they’re used to winning and they’ve dominated recent Six Nations tournaments, so there are no mental obstacles for them to overcome. Yes, the Irish are without some of their heavy hitters up front, but if Jonathan Sexton plays and goes well, they’ll take some beating. He’s the most accomplished game manager in Europe, by some distance.

In parting, I’d like to wish Alex Corbisiero, the England prop, all the luck in the world as he steps away from the sport for a year after a cruel run of injuries. I watched him develop from a talented schoolboy to a Test player with all the equipment to be one of the world’s best front-rowers. As a coach, that’s the most satisfying part of the job. That and lifting trophies.

Brian Smith was England’s attack coach between 2008 and 2011