A penny for the thoughts of Dave Rennie. The former Australia head coach, who was unceremoniously ditched to make room for the Eddie Jones circus, has largely kept his counsel ever since but his views on precisely what to make of this desperately low ebb that the Wallabies have reached would be mandatory listening.
The manner in which Rennie was pushed aside never sat well and you cannot help but see this as comeuppance for Rugby Australia. The second coming of Jones has been an inglorious failure and it will only deepen the wounds for the 63-year-old that it was his old sparring partner Warren Gatland to hammer home the extent of it. By the end of this humiliation, the Wallabies had long since thrown in the towel, Wales playing out a glorified training session.
The only previous time Jones has failed to make it out of the pool stage at a World Cup was in 2015, when he was Japan’s head coach. It was a tournament that changed the course of his career and you wonder if history will repeat itself eight years on.
It emerged in the Sydney Morning Herald on the morning of this match that Jones had conducted a secret interview for the Japan job, just two days before Australia’s final warm-up match against France. Rugby Australia’s chief executive, Phil Waugh, tried to put a brave face on it earlier in the day but his insistence that “I am a firm believer in taking people for their word” smacked of desperation.
It has been one train wreck after another since Jones’s return and during the warm-up you wondered if it had finally got to him. Twenty minutes before kick-off and there was Jones, out on the pitch, hands in pockets, a little hunched over, looking a little lost. It was not long before he was back in the thick of it, barking orders, chasing defenders around, but during those brief moments he seemed to be somewhere else entirely.
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Soon enough he was up in the coaching box and up on the big screen, roundly booed by the Wales supporters and probably a fair few from Australian fans, too. Jones has become a caricature of the pantomime villain he used to play sparingly. His legacy is on the line because he has had a fine career as an international head coach and, despite this aberration, still has an impressive record at World Cups. The question that now needs answering is: will anyone take him seriously any more?
This, lest we forget, is shaping up to be the first time that Australia fail to make it out of their pool. They have not been eliminated yet but the Wallabies are one step closer with their pool rivals Fiji – who beat Australia last weekend – so impressive hitherto. That was another issue Waugh confronted and he pulled no punches in his assessment. “It would be very disappointing,” he said.
It is also one of the worst Wallaby sides in recent memory and there is not a great deal Waugh can do about that in the short term. Jones can’t either and, as much as he may point to the absences of Taniela Tupou and Will Skelton – two losses that have considerably weakened Australia – the decline, even from four years ago when they were beaten handsomely by England in the last eight, is stark.
That said, this Australia side are not without talent. Ben Donaldson, thrust into the No 10 jersey after Jones dumped Carter Gordon to the bench, is a good example. He did a lot of things right in that period in the middle of the first half when Australia were on top, including breaking the Wales line with a fine show and go, but there was a scattiness to him and that led to mistakes. The same can be said of a lot of the side and it is hard not to see it as a consequence of Jones’s scattergun approach as the Wallabies’ head coach.
All those grandiose statements that Australia were on a “smash and grab” mission at this World Cup, all those fights he has been determined to pick, all those apologies, promptly followed by more belligerence – it must be hard to keep up if you are one of his players.
Take the decision to kick for the corner when Australia trailed 10-6 and could have easily reduced the deficit to a point. The lineout was a disaster, Wales booted clear and were soon adding another three points. From there, Wales – who, by contrast, played with a composure that reflected that of Warren Gatland – were able to squeeze the life out of the Wallabies and effortlessly pull clear after the break.
In hindsight, it was that press conference, just before Australia left for France, at which Jones started picking fights in a more ludicrous manner than normal, all the while wearing a cowboy hat he later clarified was an Akubra – “they’re Australian” he snapped – that made you think this kind of inglorious failure was possible. It was at that point that Jones’s stock had fallen to that of the laughing variety and it will take a while to rebuild his reputation after this.
• This article was amended on 25 September 2023. An earlier photo caption misidentified Josh Adams as Adam Beard.
