Eddie Jones is brilliant coach and an interesting fellow. He was the best thing about last years 6 nations and that’s a terrible indictment on the premier northern hemisphere rugby competition. The best thing about 8 weeks of action was a few ironic barbs delivered in a media room by a cocky little Aussie bloke. Ireland scored a nice try against Italy. Vunipola and Hogg did some nice things but an antipodean Quipster was the highlight and that should be shocking but everyone seems to have that convenient form of amnesia. Where you cant remember the stuff you don’t want to
What happened to all the World cup post-mortems? Well we ignored them and went back to playing zombie bash. Just a lot of dead eyed lads falling into each other grunting and pointing at their opposite man because a defensive guru from League told them they should
I don’t want to diminish what Jones has done. He has turned England in to a legitimate force again by making them accurate, dominate, and cohesive. He made them English again. A snarling bunch of massive anglo saxons that don’t back down from anyone. He made difficult selection calls that mostly worked and his choice of captain told you all you needed to know about how this England team was going to be different from the last one. Despite the personale changing as drastically as some people would have like
Now if there was one man that deserves to be a bit full of himself it was Eddie. One of the most brilliant debut seasons by a coach in the tournaments history and it also represented the tipping point when the talking was more entertaining the the playing. It’s going to be interesting to see if he can conjure a performance out of his side in Australia. Both he and Micheal Chieka must be racking their brains trying to think up of burns for each other already.
Joe Scmidht started to look like he was running out of ideas and few irish coaches ever come fully back from that. If a difficult tour to South Africa is followed by a difficult November series then Scmidht is going to be in a difficult position. The Irish public don’t understand rugby and thats been terrible for a lot for irish coaches.
Gatland after all this time with the brilliant players he has had at his disposal he could be accused of underachieving though he very rarely is. I cant believe the welsh seem to be happy with. Especially with his meagre record against the southern hemisphere
I don’t want to talk about whats going on in France because it upsets me. Guy Noves got the job 10 years too late.his beautiful Toulouse sides are now but a haunting memory
So,Eddie is the best but the rest of us really need to get better.