England invented the game of rugby. You already know that because the press rarely misses an opportunity to tell you. The country also invented the game of football, which tells you that inventing something isn't necessarily a guarantee that you'll be successful at it, but the rugby union team tends to do better than the football team does. England rugby fans are accustomed to success. World Cup wins might not come along very often, but Six Nations wins do. Experience has taught fans to expect to consistently see one of the best teams in the world. It now feels like a very long time since they've had that pleasure.
England's defeat to Ireland feels like a breaking point for the team. Without wanting to take anything away from Ireland, who were excellent, England were every bit as dismal as Ireland were great. Fans can tolerate a defeat if the team works hard and shows endeavor. England didn't. There was a lack of passion, a lack of commitment, a lack of quality, and more worrying than any of that, an apparent lack of ideas. In too many key moments, England didn't seem to have any answers to the questions asked of them by the Irish. The players looked at each other in complete bewilderment, and when they looked at the bench for inspiration, they saw similarly bewildered expressions looking back at them. Eddie Jones must surely be living through some of the darkest days of his career – and the pressure might be starting to tell on him.
Even before this game, Jones was shorter and snappier with the press than usual. We can't help but wonder what went through the minds of his players as he gave his pre-match press conference, in which he memorably described critics of his team as “rat poison.” Behind the harsh words, there was a weariness in his tone, and one can't help but wonder how much longer he'll remain in his current position. Publicly he says that he's the right man for the job and he's committed to turning things around. Privately, he must be having doubts. Anybody would. Putting Max Malins in at full-back for the first time in five years wasn't a move he wanted to make. It was a response to public pressure. Bowing to pressure isn't the sort of thing that Eddie Jones does, and it might be a sign of faltering confidence. Any professional sports coach will tell you that players pick up on that, and it feeds into their mindset. If you get the impression that your coach doesn't believe you're going to win, you inevitably begin to question yourself.
We never know which England team is going to show up when they take to the field. We know the qualities of the players, and we also know what they ought to be capable of in terms of performance. However, we have no idea whether any of those qualities are going to make themselves evident. Recently watching England has felt less like watching a team and more like taking a trip to an online slots website. There's a very popular game, made by a company called Microgaming, called “Rugby Star.” It might not be as popular as some of the other all-star online slots attractions you might have heard of – Chilli Heat, for example – but it's played by thousands of people every day. If you're one of those thousands, you'll know that you don't always get the result you're looking for, even if you have all the right symbols on your reels. That's fine within the context of online slots – that's the nature of the game – but when all the right pieces can't get you a win in real-life rugby, something has gone badly wrong.
There are other signs of things falling apart in Jones' planning. One week, Eillot Daly was dropped from the team in a dramatic show of mercilessness from the beleaguered coach. When that didn't yield immediate results, he was brought back the next week. He called up Paolo Ogodwu and then didn't even use him when the obvious opportunity presented himself. When Harry Slade was unavailable, his place on the bench went to Joe Marchant instead. Ogodwu must have wondered why he was there. So did everybody else. In the immediate aftermath of the defeat, Jones said that his team “needs to reset.” It feels like he's been smashing the reset button for the entire campaign, and he's yet to see anything he's pleased with when things reload. Eventually, it's going to be somebody else's turn to come in and press the button.
Chief among England's problems is the fact that the things they used to be good at have disappeared from their game. Rewind to 2019, and England scored the first try in all five of their games. Three of those tries came within the opening two minutes. England were fast starters, bullying their opposition from the whistle. This time around, they've been positively shy. England have conceded first for the past seven games in a row. Of the miserable tally of five first-half tries they were able to score in the whole competition, three were against Italy. At the same time, they're giving away more penalties than at any other time this century. Discipline has gone out of the window. The team is starting slowly and then committing fouls in its attempt to catch back up. Jones called two professional referees into training to provide the squad with “advice” on how to avoid committing fouls. That's the sort of thing that might be required at school level. For an international side to think it's necessary is unbelievable.
It's only a year since Jones extended his contract through to the end of the 2023 Rugby World Cup, which he intends to win. On current form, England doesn't stand a chance. This was their worst tournament showing since the 1970s, and that encompasses a lot of miserable performances. At the age of 61, the question of whether Jones is still the right man to take the team into the future has to be asked. There will have to be a rebuilding project after he's gone, no matter whether that happens now or in two years' time. Common sense says that it would be better to start that task now in preparation for the World Cup than in the aftermath of yet another desperately poor performance on the big stage. Questions are surely being asked in the corridors of power within English rugby. We hope that someone there is brave enough to provide the right answer.
