Eddie Jones says he has “no regrets” about any of his tactical decisions last Saturday and insists that England dominated the Calcutta Cup game in Edinburgh despite Scotland’s 20-17 victory. The head coach is now urging his players to “stay tough” before their Six Nations match in Rome on Sunday and has recalled the fit-again Wasps forward Joe Launchbury and London Irish’s uncapped flanker Tom Pearson to his training squad.
There has been no shortage of criticism of England’s collective handling of the final quarter at Murrayfield following the substitution of the fly-half Marcus Smith with the visitors 17-10 ahead. Jones, though, says his side’s poor attacking execution was the primary problem and that George Ford was sent on because “I felt at that stage we needed to change things”.
With Courtney Lawes still recovering from concussion, Manu Tuilagi regaining full match fitness and Lewis Ludlam out with damaged ribs, Jones is hoping Launchbury’s experience will help his squad “draw a line in the sand” and “light up Rome” this weekend. The management’s view, which will raise a few Scottish eyebrows, is that England would have won on Saturday 95 times out of 100 with slight improvements in certain areas.
“We know the result wasn’t the way we wanted but, if you look at any objective data, we dominated the game,” said Jones, whose side finished fifth last season. “If you had a betting company and they got all the information from the game, we’d win probably 85 times out of 100. Now if we’d done a number of things a little bit better, we win the game 95 times. That means our performance was pretty good but that doesn’t mean you always win the game.
“I’ve had this many times in my career, where you’ve played really well, dominated all the things that are important and still lose. Rather than me giving them the solutions I want the players to give me them. That’s the way coaching has changed to a great degree. I want them to own the problem, rather than me owning the problem.”
On the subject of his substitutions, meanwhile, Jones has clarified that Smith was not replaced because of any specific GPS fitness data but largely on gut feel. “We don’t get any live GPS because of the stadiums,” the head coach said. “It’s about your observation and your gut feel, which is based on some data.
“For instance, each of the players have a stress signal when they’re tired. When we take a player off it’s because they’ve shown us they’re in physical distress and don’t have much left in the tank.” So did Smith fit into that category? “His was more … I felt at that stage we needed to change things. I am in charge so my opinion is the only one that counts. We have a plan – like every coach does – but we adjust it to what is happening in the game.
“I don’t have any regrets about what happened on Saturday in terms of the replacements we made. I’ve been a television commentator and I was the smartest coach in the world. It is easy, with the hindsight of replays, to get everything right. We got a yellow card which upset the apple cart a little bit.”
Previous lean spells with Australia have also caused him to be slightly more phlegmatic about external opinions than he once was. “When I was with the Wallabies I allowed criticism of me to get to me and it affected my relationships with the players. Now that’s why I don’t pay any attention to the media.
“I love these weeks as a coach. I don’t love the result but I love the challenge of trying to pull everyone together and back on the same page.” Whenever you have a loss, particularly when you have a young team, you can fragment a little bit. People start worrying about themselves. Our job is to make sure we stay together, stay tough and stay focused on what’s important.”
