Book Review: Eddie Jones Autobiography

Very few rugby people who have spent much time on the "Tier 2" international circuit have written books, so I picked up Eddie Jones' autobiography with particular interest in reading about his time coaching in Japan and memorable four year stint as national team head coach.

Unfortunately, if like me, what you were hoping for was some insight on Japanese rugby and the team that created probably the biggest shock in RWC history vs South Africa, then I cannot recommend this book as it appears clearly aimed towards more of a casual audience in England or Australia, and presumes that few care so much about the details of his work in Japan.

Indeed the section on his years in Japan between 2009 and 2015 is only just a bit longer than the following chapter on just his first few months in England.

You meet no more than just a couple of the key figures in his Japan team. Fumiaki Tanaka, Harumichi Tatekawa, Kosei Ono, Luke Thompson, Shota Horie, Hitoshi Ono, Kensuke Hatakeyama, Male Sa'u, and Amanaki Mafi do not get any mention whatsoever outside of a rehashed match report of the SA game.

He also doesn't even mention in passing a single match from an entire calendar year's worth of international rugby with Japan in 2014, but does go into detail about the time he had coffee with Dylan Hartley and he spoke to an elderly tea lady at the RFU base at Pennyhill Park, or the value of a psychologist who spent a couple weeks with his England backroom staff.

His account includes a handful factual blunders (perhaps his claim that he "won't sleep for more than four or five hours" a night is not helpful for memory). He appears to think he was coaching Suntory Sungoliath against Robbie Deans' Panasonic Wild Knights playing "Crusaders-style rugby" (Jones coached Suntory from 2009 to 2011, Deans only became Panasonic coach in 2014).

He also thinks Japan played Scotland, Russia, and Spain in their November tests of 2014 (that was in 2013, the tests Jones missed after the stroke he had just been describing on the preceding pages).

He thinks when Japan beat 13-10 Georgia in their final RWC warm up in 2015 that "we turned over their scrum and scored a try in the last minute" (simply untrue, they actually conceded five scrum penalties in that match, but won late on with a rolling maul).

Depending on how nit picky you want to be. You could find quite a number more instances of these lapses in Jones' memory and other rather odd pronouncements throughout the book.

According to Jones his match with Wales in 2016 was "rightly billed as a Grand Slam decider" (no it wasn't, because Wales had already drawn their first match), the three time reigning world champions South Africa are "the sleeping giant of world rugby", when he "needed a second row" [at the Reds] he had "the perfect player lined up" in a 185cm Rugby League player Luke O'Donnell, and perhaps most bizarrely of all that before RWC 2015 "few experts had given [Australia] much chance of even getting out of a group that included England and Wales" (at the time Australia had won 10 straight matches in six years vs Wales, and also recently beaten New Zealand and South Africa in the Rugby Championship).

Eddie Jones does talk quite a bit on the politics of Australian rugby and clashes with leaders at the ARU, whilst in the case of English rugby where he switches to give fulsome praise of his employers at the RFU (including their "genuine commitment to expand the global game") and only has some issues with the clubs. But totally ignores this behind the scenes aspect when it comes to Japanese rugby.

On departing his role as Japan coach he writes that:

I had thought I would remain in charge of Japan until the end of 2019. I had even signed a new four-year contract extension early in 2015. But a month before the World Cup I realized I couldn’t stay on. I worried that my coaching would stagnate and I knew that Japan would benefit from a different coach with fresh ideas. I also carried the painful memory of the mistake I made with the Wallabies when I should have moved on after the 2003 World Cup.

This is totally at odds with how the story was told in Japanese rugby at the time, which was that Eddie Jones grew ever increasingly upset with administrators in Japan as his pet project the Sunwolves (which is not mentioned at all in the book) was struggling to get going due to a number of different challenges.

There is also no response at all to the criticism of him from Jamie Joseph who accused him of not leaving the incoming coaches any information about the job (something Jones himself praises his predecessor in the England role Stuart Lancaster of doing with him just three weeks after he took over).

Likelihood here is that Eddie Jones and his publishers decided there was no interest in how Japanese rugby is run so chose to skip over it and just offer some very hard to believe reasoning behind his exit.

Also Jones' account of how he created such a memorable RWC campaign portrays himself as a foreseeing genius in devising a "Beat the Boks" masterplan, but he goes into very little detail so it just looks like something so banal that you could probably find similar advice from a fan on an internet forum. 

We would play the same fast, aggressive rugby we had worked on the past three years. It was vital that we maintained the speed of the ball and kept it in play, staying away from set pieces and striving to keep the score as close as possible so that doubts could begin to fester in Springbok heads. We would take them low and tackle in numbers – with our physical bravery matched by an emotional courage that we would play flat and attacking rugby.

If beating the Springboks were really so simple then anybody could do it. He cannot have seriously just told his team advice so blatantly obvious as "strive to keep the score as close as possible" and thought this some great tactical insight. As opposed to doing what else? Let them get into a big lead?  

Fact is the upset over South Africa came far more out of the blue and was more of a rugby miracle than he makes out. He claims his forwards coach Steve Borthwick would (absurdly) say to his players they had "beaten the Boks" after wins over Hong Kong, Korea, Canada, Uruguay, and Georgia in the months beforehand as they had perfected "the exact style of rugby we needed to defeat South Africa".

A couple of things are forgotten as they don't fit this narrative. Losses to Fiji and Tonga, or shipping 45 points to a "World XV" selection in the warm up matches are ignored, whilst narrowly squeezing past Georgia late on was also hardly suggestive of a "Beat the Boks gameplan we had honed to perfection".

Secondly one of things Jones claims was part of this plan was "staying away from set pieces". Yet he created a side that relied more upon scrums, lineouts and maul than any Japanese side has ever been before or afterwards. If you look back at that period you will find a huge percentage of their points actually stemmed from scrum penalties and pushovers or rolling drive mauls.

Just remember for instance the Leitch try vs South Africa, or the call for more scrums at the end, the scrum penalty try vs Samoa, and other rolling maul tries vs Scotland or USA. You may also recall the warm up match vs Fiji in the PNC where Japan spent a massive amount of time trying to get tries from scrums five metres out. It is far more accurate to say that it was in the Jamie Joseph era that Japan have performed far more twinkle toes fast and creative rugby than they did in the Eddie Jones era.

Jones' coaching wisdom in this book actually comes across as rather unimpressive. There is little tactical rugby acumen offered besides the totally obvious throughout the whole book. For example when talking about devising a plan of how to beat the All Blacks he advises the following:

You have to take their space and hit them hard. When you attack you need to run powerfully to tire them out. You have to get in their heads and make them very uncomfortable.

Instead there is far more of what comes across like some mixture of a "mindset" self-help book and a motivational speaker powerpoint presentation. He cites former Athletics coach Frank Dick's "four fatal fears" (of making a mistake, of losing, of rejection, and of criticism), "marginal gains" gets a mention, and reading this book it comes as little surprise that Jones says he now has a side business project selling "all we have learnt about change, culture and building high performing teams" to the corporate world.

Here is one example of that cutting edge self-help book type insight he is selling to those businesses ...

Courage and humility are required to ask questions in front of your peers. The fear is that you might end up looking stupid. It’s easier to sit back and say nothing. But the best coaches are risk-takers. They are not, however, aimless gamblers. The risks they take are calculated. They are quite happy to ask difficult or seemingly obvious questions to discover something new. It’s the only way to avoid life in the dreaded comfort zone.

In conclusion other than some interesting parts earlier in the book about his upbringing and emergence as a professional rugby coach, this book as a look at Eddie Jones' coaching career it is not great and you'd likely get more from searching for interviews on YouTube. Even the chapters on his time with England are filled with pages of him just quoting himself in the pre and post-match press conferences than offering anything new. It also leaves me more with the impression that his value with Japan was more as a motivational manager with a good eye for searching for new expertise than himself a master strategist.

Jones deserves much credit for appointing Borthwick, Marc Dal Maso, John Pryor, and Leigh Jones who all did phenomenal work improving set piece, fitness and defence. It is in the canny recruitment across various countries of such a well assembled staff that is the main thing than other Tier 2 nations can follow (although the budget for training camps and time spent together cannot be replicated by other Tier 2 nations). His other motivational management speak and rather simple tactical advice like "you have to take [the All Blacks] space and hit them hard" is unlikely to be transformative though.