WHENEVER we talk of Edward I, which admittedly is not an everyday occurrence, we invariably refer to him as the “Hammer of the Scots”. Judging by the reaction to last weekend’s Calcutta Cup contest, Edward Jones has earned himself a similar sobriquet.
Sadly for him, it’s not quite similar enough.
“Hammered BY the Scots” is not the kind of thing a chap wants chiselled into his gravestone.
The list of sins, some of omission (the failure to ask someone other than Joe Marler to propel the ball into a crucial line-out) and others of commission (the premature withdrawal of Marcus Smith), were itemised with complete clarity by Johnnie Beattie, a fine Scottish back rower of the recent past, in an online column still to be found somewhere in cyberspace.
Beattie was forensic: on the Smith call, the lineout decision, the kicking strategy, the scrum set-up, you name it. If truth be told, it was hard to argue with any of his condemnations.
And in traditional “one thing after another” style, Jones is now being criticised for calling in the uncapped London Irish forward Tom Pearson rather than more familiar “fringe” players like George Martin of Leicester or Ted Hill of Worcester.
This may fly in the face of the zeitgeist, but it is right to defend Jones on this one. The whole point of summoning a variety of “possibles” to the training camp is to stress-test them in a new and challenging environment – to watch them at close quarters, talk to them behind closed doors, assess their interaction with the elite players.
To see how they measure up, in other words. If Jones now knows as much about Pearson as he does about Martin and Hill, all well and good.
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