‘It was bizarre’: The inside story of Eddie Jones’ chaotic second coming
The second coming of Eddie Jones began with high hopes, and ended with Australian rugby in its deepest ever hole. How did it go so wrong?
By
Iain Payten and
Tom Decent
NOVEMBER 3, 2023
In the last week of the Wallabies’ Rugby World Cup campaign, players and coaches were living in a state of purgatory; neither in the World Cup finals nor out of them.
Having lost to
Fiji and
Wales, the Wallabies had effectively also lost their chance to play in knockout stages for the first time in World Cup history. But with Fiji needing to secure just one bonus point against Portugal a weekend later to make it official, the zombie Wallabies continued training for a week at their base in Saint-Etienne, a small French city about an hour’s drive from Lyon, for the remote chance they could make it through.
As the week wore on, players tried to keep the mood light and a group of Wallabies coaching staff – without coach Eddie Jones – were spotted out drinking beers in the town square.
But camp life carried a strange vibe, and Jones made it even more unusual when he started pulling players aside at the team hotel, according to a Wallabies player who spoke to the
Herald on the condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardise his employment.
“There were a couple of very bizarre meetings in the last week of the World Cup, after Portugal. They felt like goodbye meetings,” the player recalled.
“They were one-on-one meetings. Guys would come out and go ‘was that a goodbye? Don’t we have a plan for next year?’. Mate, it was bizarre.”
Jones was contracted to coach the Wallabies for another four years. But five weeks after the
Herald reported Jones had done a Zoom interview with Japan and 12 days after Jones stood at Coogee Oval and said he was in for the long haul through to 2027, the goodbye was finally made official. He resigned as Wallabies coach on October 29, citing unmet guarantees from Rugby Australia about resources and high-performance reform.
Before revealing his resignation to media outlets, Jones sent a message to the Wallabies squad WhatsApp group.
“It said, ‘I am proud to have worked with you. Contrary to media I haven’t signed anything (with Japan) and am going to spend the next month deciding my next move’,” the Wallaby player said.
It ended a short but chaos-filled second coming for Jones, which began with optimism and high hopes, but ended with Rugby Australia in its deepest ever hole. To understand how – and why – the Jones journey went off the rails so badly, the
Herald has spoken to a large group of people directly involved in the slow-moving train wreck.
At the end of 2022 – well before his return to Australia – Jones appeared to be in more immediate strife than his then-Wallabies counterpart Dave Rennie. As England coach, Jones was under heavy fire for the team’s lacklustre form and results, which had seen the English win just five from 12 Tests. The Wallabies hadn’t fared any better, with five wins from 14 Tests.
But after also enduring an injury toll that saw 40 players sidelined in the Test winter, Wallabies players felt enthused about the 2023 Rugby World Cup, after a spring tour where they’d
fielded a weakened team and only lost to the world No.1 and No.2 sides, Ireland and France, by the closest of margins.
“We were a couple of penalty goals away from going five [wins] from five [Tests] and people going ‘look out for Australia’,” a Wallaby player, who requested anonymity to talk freely, said.
RA commissioned former Olympic rower Bo Hanson to review the year, and a separate examination of the worrying injury toll was also completed. The results were shared with the players at the Wallabies’ first camp on the Gold Coast on January 10. As the rest of the nation was focused on the summer of cricket and tennis, Rennie gathered a 44-man squad to lay out the plans for the Rugby World Cup campaign to come.
“Looking back, I guess what they were hoping to get out of it [the review] was that Rens [Rennie] had lost the room. But it came back glowingly in favour of him,” the Wallaby player said. “Everyone loved him and he was an incredible coach. There was no doubt we had problems with injury rates and all that, but to be honest, that review did what it needed to do.”
Rugby Australia chairman Hamish McLennan was fuming about the Wallabies’ results on the Spring Tour, and in particular a loss to Italy on November 13. As RA’s representative in Florence, defeat was difficult viewing for McLennan at Stadio Artemio Franchi.
The Wallabies were made to play five Tests in a row on that tour, an increase on the usual four. Knowing his first-choice side would struggle playing on five consecutive weekends, Rennie made 11 changes to his starting side and it backfired with a one-point loss.
Rennie’s future was now in question, and McLennan had eyes for another coach.
The well-connected Sydney business figure, who also is chairman of the REA Group and deputy chair of Magellan Financial Group, had already begun a charm offensive to woo Eddie Jones home as Wallabies coach in 2024, and through to the Rugby World Cup in Australia in 2027. Jones was on contract with the Rugby Football Union until the end of 2023.
The pair
first discussed the plan in July 2022 when Jones was in Sydney with England for the last game of a three-Test series. McLennan hosted a dinner for Jones at his Lavender Bay home, where they ate Portuguese chicken and salad made by the chairman’s wife Lucinda.
The dinner occurred just days after
Jones reacted angrily to a fan labelling him a “traitor” at the Sydney Cricket Ground.
When McLennan discovered the RFU had not inserted a no-compete clause in their termination agreement with Jones, he saw his chance. Selling the vision of RA being on the cusp of a resources boom via a private equity deal, and with long-overdue centralisation reform now a matter of when, not if, McLennan convinced Jones to come a year early and a five-year deal was fleshed out.
Rennie would need to be sacked but some on RA’s board – comprised of Brett Godfrey, Daniel Herbert, Phil Waugh, Pip Marlow, Karen Penrose, Jane Wilson, Matthew Hanning and the then-chief executive Andy Marinos – weren’t immediately sold.
Sources familiar with the boardroom discussions, who requested anonymity to speak freely, said there were dissenting views, but after debating the risks and rewards, the board agreed to make the change. Behind the scenes, McLennan led the negotiations. Marinos disagreed with the call to appoint Jones.
“Nothing was going to stop Hamish,” said a source familiar with discussions. “He went after Eddie. Hamish went and got his man. He believed it was going to be the magic pill.”
With Rennie’s win percentage at 38, the board decided the chance to sign Jones was worth the gamble. McLennan argued former Wallabies were supportive of the move, and that Jones had a “hard edge” that Rennie did not. The chair later upset some players and fans by appearing to criticise Rennie’s penchant for playing guitar in team bonding sessions.
“I would rather we have somebody who’s really tough and we win World Cups than we have a Kumbaya session, everyone holds hands and we fail,” McLennan said.
Marinos publicly defended the decision to sack Rennie but
resigned as chief executive five months later, after his relationship with McLennan became strained. Marinos declined to comment when contacted this week.
McLennan rejects the argument that hiring Jones was a captain’s pick. “We went in with good faith ... we at Rugby Australia felt that we needed to make a change and it [appointing Jones] wasn’t just me, it went through the rugby committee and the board,” McLennan said this week at Sydney Airport.
“There was an appropriate level of governance around that decision, but we weren’t tracking well. We lost a lot of games last year to big teams. And so all I’d just say to the rugby public, is that you’ve got to continue to make decisions, not all of them work out. If this was a business, you would find that you don’t get 100 per cent success rate and I stand by the calls.”
‘Nothing was going to stop Hamish. He went after Eddie. Hamish went and got his man. He believed it was going to be the magic pill.’
Waugh, who replaced Marinos as RA chief executive, said on Tuesday of the Jones hiring: “Hindsight is a wonderful thing. When you make decisions at any time during your career ... you get presented information at the time and you make decisions based on that information.”
Players had mixed emotions. On one hand, they were upset about Rennie’s departure, but on the other, the return of Jones – a noted Rugby World Cup specialist – generated buzz. “The guys were disappointed,” the Wallabies player said. “But a lot were also excited. If they were gonna get rid of Rens and bring someone in, Eddie Jones … look at what he has done. Everyone fell in love with the idea of a bloke coming in who has done well at World Cups.”
The next six months were a honeymoon period. RA basked in the hyper-luminous glow of Jones, whose profile and personality immediately saw rugby back on the TV news and back pages of newspapers after spending too long in the wilderness.
For a while, there wasn’t a lunch or school fundraiser on a Friday that didn’t have Jones on hand as a special guest. He answered questions, cracked jokes and built Australian rugby’s stocks back up one room at a time.
Jones could have a room of coaches, business figures, sporting identities, members of the media, eating out of the palm of his hand with wisecracks and a confidence-inducing spiel about the Wallabies being a genuine chance to win the World Cup.
He was often seen volunteering his time to coach juniors, too. NRL supremo and Nine broadcaster Phil Gould agreed to do a
one-on-one interview with Jones in the sheds at Coogee Oval, which aired in February
. One onlooker recalls marveling at the sight of Tennis Australia chief executive Craig Tiley queueing patiently to get a ball signed by Jones after one function in Melbourne.
However, the sailing wasn’t entirely smooth. Jones privately began bemoaning the quality of performances of Australian Super Rugby teams, and pulling together a coaching staff became a major struggle.
Apart from forwards coach Dan McKellar, Jones didn’t want to carry forward any of Rennie’s crew. Experienced forwards coach Laurie Fisher was let go. McKellar did not accept an offer to stay and instead took the Leicester Tigers head coach job after getting a picture of how inexperienced Jones’ coaching staff would be.
In the end, former rugby league player Brett Hodgson became defence coach, and Brad Davis – a former defence coach at London Irish– became attack coach. Brumbies scrum guru Dan Palmer took on a role as lineout coach, and little-known French coach Pierre-Henry Broncan – a former halfback – was employed as a maul coach.
Super Rugby sides were supportive of Jones but one official, who did not want to be named because of their continued employment, said alarm bells about communication with the Wallabies program first rang when Jones held his first mid-season camp in April.
Having left their Super Rugby teams for several days, but with games still to play on the weekend, the Wallabies did their training in the camp – but didn’t wear GPS devices to track the training loads, as is standard. Super Rugby teams were left in the dark and unclear about how much training players needed to do when they returned from the Gold Coast.
The opacity of Jones’ long-term plans also became an issue in May. In Australian rugby circles, speculation that Jones would not see out his full, five-year contract had been bubbling since he landed in Australia in late January. But most expected the coach would at least stay until after the British and Irish Lions tour in 2025.
Jones sidestepped questions about his future until he told former England captain Lawrence Dallaglio on an
Evening Standard podcast on May 31 that he only intended to stay for one year with the Wallabies. “I’m only coaching ’til this World Cup,” Jones said. “I’ve signed [until the end of 2027], but as I’ve made the mistake before, I’ve stayed too long. So we win the World Cup, it will be time to go. If we lose the World Cup, it will be time to go.”
It left Australian rugby stunned: did Jones just say the quiet part out loud?
The
Herald immediately messaged Jones to offer a chance to clarify, but he declined on several occasions. Senior RA officials privately dismissed the remarks as “Eddie being Eddie”, but when pushed by the media for a comment, a spokesman said Jones was contracted through to 2027 and the comment was referencing his single-minded focus on the 2023 Rugby World Cup.
Five days later, Jones contacted the
Herald and asked if his position could be
clarified in print. “I am here for five years,” Jones said. “But my only concentration is this Rugby World Cup, so I don’t think past that.”
Jones had been emphasising the need for strong leadership from senior players in the Wallabies’ 2023 campaign. At least once a week during Super Rugby, Jones convened the leadership group on Zoom calls, along with sports psychology experts. The message was drilled into them that a belief in the team’s ability to win the World Cup would be crucial to helping young players think the same way.
“He painted a picture that experienced guys were going to be important to the World Cup,” a Wallaby player said.
In late June, Jones had named Michael Hooper and James Slipper as co-captains and incumbent players were used in the Wallabies’ first two games against South Africa and Argentina.
After the Wallabies travelled to South Africa, documentary crews began filming the team’s every move, with Jones wearing a microphone at training and in team meetings.
A heavy kicking strategy was employed against the Springboks but they thumped the Wallabies 43-12 in Pretoria. When the Wallabies lost their second consecutive game a week later to Argentina at CommBank Stadium in Sydney in July, Jones lost faith in the senior players. Hooper missed the Test with a calf injury.
“That was when everything changed. Some switch was flicked,” the Wallabies player recalled.
Jones went for a younger team, and new leadership, to take on the All Blacks in two Tests in Melbourne and Dunedin. Having changed tactics to hold the ball more, and attack directly, the Wallabies began to find their groove. They lost at the MCG but a week later in Dunedin, the Wallabies led 17-3 before being beaten at the death 23-20.
Players and coaches were slowly adjusting to life inside Camp Jones, some with more comfort than others.
A notoriously hard taskmaster inclined to have blunt conversations, Jones is famous for churning through assistant coaches. But unlike in his first stint with the Wallabies, most players now didn’t feel like they were walking on eggshells. “There was a barrier. The staff would really cop it, the leaders were the next barrier and the players were mostly sheltered from it,” a Wallabies player said. “Hoops was the guy who stood up for the group. It wasn’t confrontational but in those meetings if someone wasn’t right, Hoops would say it. Maybe that was deemed as being too challenging.”
Elsewhere, optimism about the Wallabies’ World Cup chances wasn’t in great supply. On July 20 – the night the Matildas began their soon-to-be famous World Cup campaign against Ireland at Homebush – RA sponsor RM Williams hosted an intimate dinner in the exclusive Clock Tower at Shell House in Sydney for rugby supporters, media executives and corporate supporters. The occasion was to launch a new RM Williams line of rugby apparel, but it doubled as a chance for RA to rally enthusiasm for the upcoming World Cup.
Australia’s two World Cup-winning skippers, John Eales and Nick Farr-Jones, were asked to give a few words. They largely stuck to their stock anecdotes from the past. When the dessert course had been cleared and guests stood to chat, some privately shared concerns about the team’s World Cup chances.
The Dunedin performance had given Wallabies fans a glimmer of hope but things took a sharp and unexpected turn when Jones settled on his 33-man squad for the Rugby World Cup. Jones left out many senior players – none more shocking than Hooper, who’d been battling a calf injury but was expected to be fit by the start of the World Cup; his last before international retirement. Quade Cooper, Pete Samu, Bernard Foley, Jed Holloway, Reece Hodge and Tom Wright were also omitted.
A day before the public found out, however, the players were told. But in contrast to recent World Cup campaigns, where Michael Cheika organised for former Wallabies to ring players with the good news, the process for the 2023 announcement was flawed.
The 33 players picked to go were told via a phone call from Wallabies general manager Chris Webb in the afternoon. One bolter, who’d had no contact with the Wallabies for weeks, had to hurriedly pack a bag for a flight the next day and re-arrange his winter plans.
But by 7pm, unsuccessful candidates had still not been told about their fate, and there was a flight to Darwin early the next day for a camp.
Sources with knowledge of the plan said Jones was due to make the calls to players who missed out. But the calls were delayed because the coach was on a flight back to Australia. Jones had dashed back to the UK after the Dunedin match with his wife to pick up their Papillon dog, Annie, and take it to their home in Japan.
With the Wallabies’ WhatsApp group lighting up with excited chat, players who hadn’t been told began to phone Webb, asking what was going on. Jones ended up speaking to Hooper that night but Cooper didn’t take his call, and the pair still haven’t spoken.
Jones later explained he’d left out Hooper and star centre Len Ikitau because he didn’t want to carry injured players who may not make the first game. But he also named Max Jorgensen, Samu Kerevi and Josh Kemeny who were all recovering from respective injuries.
Jones pushed the button on a young squad for the World Cup and conceded he felt that senior players from the Rennie era had maxed out their potential. It was the youngest, most inexperienced Wallabies squad ever sent to a Rugby World Cup.
The public were shocked by Jones’ inexperienced squad, and so were the Wallabies. “It just went against a lot of what he had said all year,” a Wallaby told the
Herald.
“He started saying things like ’27 is important. All of a sudden, it felt like ‘ah, he’s put in a safety net for us not doing well in France’. The belief levels – well, no one spoke about it – but you could feel it, that he is grooming guys for the 2027 World Cup and this one isn’t important.”
On the eve of the Wallabies’ departure from Australia, one of Jones’ assistants was unable to continue. Attack coach Davis, who’d been driven particularly hard by Jones, along with Hodgson, left the team camp in Darwin.
RA announced Davis’ exit a few days later – citing “family reasons” – as the team gathered at the airport to fly out to the World Cup. “There’s a potential candidate ready to step up now,” Jones told reporters. “I think we’ll improve the coaching staff.”
Jones, who hadn’t held an in-person press conference since naming his World Cup squad, stood in front of members of the fourth estate at a media conference at Sydney Airport. Like the rest of the touring group, Jones had a brand new Akubra hat on his head.
The squad was flying out to France for the Rugby World Cup but the mood was anything but celebratory. Jones bristled when the questions started. Why had Cooper not taken his call? Did Hooper, a Wallabies great, really have to ring team management to find out his World Cup dream was over?
Jones snapped, labelling it the “worst press conference” he’d ever been involved in and inviting journalists to “give yourselves uppercuts” before walking through to customs.
“There was no need for it,” said a Wallabies squad member. “It was funny but it’s not professional. It was just creating a circus when we should be focusing on rugby. Guys were wondering ‘is this really good for us?’.”
About an hour after the press conference, Jones texted a reporter who had asked questions in the scrum. “Don’t ever contact me again,” Jones wrote. Asked why, Jones blocked the journalist’s number.
During the World Cup, a Japanese media report emerged suggesting Jones was a candidate for that country’s head coaching role in 2024. “Bullshit and gossip,” Jones responded via a Wallabies spokesperson.
The story wasn’t over, though. After Jones’ denials, the
Herald’s Tom Decent received a tantalising tip that Jones took part in a secret Zoom interview with the Japanese Rugby Football Union days before the World Cup began. The
Herald spent days investigating and fact-checking the information.
Players were oblivious to the Japanese talks, until the
Herald’s story broke hours before Australia’s match against Wales. Jones deflected questions about the Japan interview, saying: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Captain Will Skelton told the press that the
Herald’s story had not disrupted the preparation and that most players didn’t know anything about it. But a Wallabies player this week recounted a different version of events.
“We were talking about it on the day of the game,” he said. “It was a bizarre mood after that game. We got the same line [from Jones] as the media got. That was alarm bells. He didn’t even trust us.”
Jones told players, coaches and his bosses at RA there was nothing to the story. Press conferences were tense. At one point, a Wallabies media manager asked how much longer the probing would go on for.
Jones’ inexperienced squad was only one part of the Wallabies’ problems heading into the Rugby World Cup.
Tactically, the coach had elected to abandon the way the team had been playing for the last three years and focus on a game based on ad-lib attack. All major Test nations, and a majority of successful club teams, operate with attacking structures, which dictate default patterns players will attack from on the field.
Jones decided the Wallabies wouldn’t play with any pre-set structures, and instead attack with more freedom, as they saw the opportunity before them. But also believing possession rugby was dead, Jones didn’t want to hold the ball for more than four phases.
Prior to the last warm-up game against France, Jones changed the game plan again, to keep their style hidden. Australia lost to Fiji for the first time in 69 years and the next week their World Cup fate was sealed with a 40-6 loss to Wales. It was the heaviest defeat in Wallabies World Cup history.
Jones covered his face with his hands. Wallabies fans, many who had paid large sums of money to be in France, walked out of the stadium in Lyon before the full-time whistle had sounded.
Along with Jones’ links to Japan – which were now being reported by other world media outlets – the Wallabies’ disastrous campaign saw the heat intensify on Jones.
When Jones returned home from France, he fronted a press conference at Coogee Oval on October 17. But despite speculation he may quit, Jones repeated he was in for the long haul. But public support was thin on the ground and within a week Jones had begun working on an exit strategy.
In the week of the Rugby World Cup final, McLennan and RA hosted a function at the Australian Embassy in Paris on October 25, celebrating the 2027 Rugby World Cup in Australia.
In a room looking out to the adjacent Eiffel Tower, World Rugby chairman Bill Beaumont and New Zealand rugby boss Mark Robinson were among the distinguished guests. Unbeknown to most people in the room, Jones and his representatives informed RA earlier that day they did not see a future in Australia for the under-fire coach.
There was one last flurry of headlines, when Jones told
Herald columnist Peter FitzSimons, a former Wallaby, that he didn’t regret omitting Hooper, Cooper and Foley and described the trio as
not the right role models for the team.
Hooper declined to respond, but current and former Wallabies were stunned.
“It was really disappointing and it didn’t sit well with the players at all,” the Wallabies player said. “It felt like he was trying to blame what’s happened here for the last decade for all his problems. He experimented on a style of footy that hasn’t really been done before, with a really young group, and hasn’t really owned it.”
With Waugh now back in Australia, discussions via Zoom began for an exit. Details of the negotiations are unclear, but the talks were swift. By Sunday evening news filtered out that Jones had resigned.
Jones did an exit interview with
The Australian, bemoaning the speed in which the game could achieve centralisation, and later told FitzSimons: “
gave it a run. Hopefully be the catalyst for change. Sometimes you have to eat shit for others to eat caviar further down the track.”
Jones may be gone but the fallout of his 10-month rollercoaster is only just beginning. Fronting a press conference this week, Waugh said the RA leadership who’d gambled on Jones resurrecting the Wallabies would take ownership of the fact it, in fact, sank the Wallabies to a new low.
But McLennan said he won’t follow Jones and resign. Waugh said Australian rugby’s voting members have the power to effect change on the Rugby Australia board, if they see fit.
For the Wallabies players, the Jones saga – and the lost year of 2023 – just represents a wasted opportunity. Many won’t get another shot at playing in Rugby World Cup, or even wearing a Wallabies jersey.
