It is the morning after the 2019 World Cup final and on the 47th floor of Tokyo’s Keio Plaza hotel, the Rugby Football Union’s chief executive, Bill Sweeney, is reflecting on what might have been. The conversation soon turns to whether Eddie Jones – at this point contracted until August 2021 – will stay on for the next World Cup. “We just need to sit down when we get back, have a couple of bottles of red wine and chat about where it goes,” says Sweeney. Pressed on whether Jones is the man to carry England to France 2023, he adds: “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”
Several hours later, soon after his flight lands at Heathrow, Jamie George gets a phone call. It is the Saracens director of rugby, Mark McCall, informing him of the club’s swingeing punishments for breaking the salary cap – a £5.36m fine and 35 points docked. Relegation is looming. It is a phone call McCall will have had to make to Owen Farrell, Maro Itoje, the Vunipolas and the rest of Saracens’ England contingent, who had been shielded from the news while in Japan.
There are myriad reasons why England have just arrived in France in crisis, ranked eighth in the world and expectations at an all-time low, four years after fielding the youngest ever side in a World Cup final – but the immediate aftermath of that crushing defeat by South Africa in Yokohama is as good a place to start as any.
Jones took that loss badly. He said he didn’t want to be “kicking stones for four years” when addressing his future, then turned on his inquisitors. “Remember three weeks ago, I was going to get the sack – there was going to be blood on the walls at Twickenham. Sorry guys, but you’ve got me for another two years.”
He took himself on holiday to Okinawa in Japan and somewhere in between three CrossFit sessions a day decided he wanted another crack at a trophy which, as head coach, has eluded him. His stock was high after one of England’s greatest performances in the semi-final against New Zealand and, with Australia in need of a head coach, Jones held the aces. Sweeney tried to cool his interest publicly the next time he held court but a deal was swiftly agreed, kept under wraps until after the next Six Nations at the behest of Jones.
If that sounds convoluted then the issue of Jones’s tenure, when it would end and who would replace him always was. Initially he was here for four years when appointed in 2015 by Ian Ritchie, the then RFU chief executive. His replacement was Steve Brown, who was hounded out in November 2018 amid accusations of mismanaging finances. Under his watch 64 employees were made redundant and during that chaotic reign Jones’s power base was strengthened to the extent he was allowed overspend on the 2019 budget by nearly £1m, all the while signing a new contract to 2021, an extension designed to coincide with the British & Irish Lions tour of South Africa.
That extension, and England’s passage to the final in Japan, made up Sweeney’s mind. Ultimately, he concluded the baggage that came with Jones was worth it. Sweeney, who started as CEO in June 2019, was seduced by Jones’s promise of going one better in 2023 and so the Australian’s obsession with the World Cup was burnished.
Cracks start to show
It was an inauspicious start to the 2020 Six Nations. Jones said he wanted to develop “the greatest rugby team the world has ever seen” shortly before an opening defeat by France and though England would go on to win the title in October – a seven-month delay enforced by the Covid-19 pandemic – the cracks were beginning to show.
Throughout that championship Jones stuck by the Saracens spine of his team. They were the dominant force, Farrell was the captain and George, the Vunipolas and Itoje his henchmen but there was friction in the camp given Saracens’ salary cap scandal. Jones later admitted as much but he kept faith in them through the Autumn Nations Cup in late 2020 as well as the next Six Nations in which the wheels came off en route to a fifth-place finish.
“Saracens had ruled the hegemonic state of English rugby. They controlled everything,” Jones wrote in Leadership, the second book published during his tenure, released in late 2021.
But after relegation, “the Saracens core had cracked completely, their power had dissolved. Our leadership group was rocked and we now need to repair the fractured chemistry or rebuild the entire entity.”
Around that time George Ford described possession as like having “a timebomb”, so unappealing had England’s tactics become. Still, Jones was fiercely loyal to his Saracens players but since the World Cup final you could count the number of genuinely emphatic performances by Farrell, George, either of the Vunipolas, Itoje or Elliot Daly on one hand.
Cost of Covid
The impact of the pandemic was, by definition, felt across the globe. When looking for reasons for England’s decline, however, Covid-19 is inescapable. The draining effects of life in a bubble, where at first players were unable to eat meals or socialise together – “It’s taken its toll on people psychologically,” was Ellis Genge’s view in March 2021 – and the crippling cost to both the RFU and the Premiership.
For the RFU, the figures were stark, £150m in lost revenue, while the clubs were haemorrhaging £1m a month. Some railroaded players into pay cuts – others had the sense to negotiate – but the five-month pause on fixtures and the prolonged wait for crowds to return laid bare the precariousness of business models operating in the Premiership.
Compounding matters for the clubs, the professional game agreement with the RFU contained a clause that became active in the summer of 2020 and stated that central funding would be directly linked to the union’s revenues, which are themselves wholly reliant on selling out Twickenham. The government stepped in with a £135m bailout but still, three clubs have since gone to the wall: Worcester, Wasps and London Irish.
The clubs took two significant steps: to end relegation and to reduce the salary cap. Ending relegation has led to a league in which more tries are scored but the impact on England has been clear. It was a thinly veiled dig by Jones when pointing to Michael Jordan’s Last Dance documentary and opining that, in a closed league such as the NBA, defence is largely optional until teams reach the playoffs.
Reducing the salary cap to £5m put the squeeze on clubs. Bumper wages commanded by England players who miss large parts of the season – more than 60% of the 2022-23 campaign as revealed by the Guardian – became less justifiable. Those salaries had been inflated by Saracens’ misdemeanours and clubs no longer view it beneficial to house multiple England stars. That Anthony Watson has spent the summer on an RFU training contract because he could not secure a club speaks volumes.
When clubs enforced cuts on their players the threat of industrial action was mooted. Given salaries have not returned to their pre-pandemic levels it is little wonder that players are looking abroad. Jack Willis has shown how English players can prosper in France and Jack Nowell, Sam Simmonds, David Ribbans, Joe Marchant and Henry Arundell have followed. The players want to be able to move abroad and still represent England, and with Steve Borthwick’s backing they told the RFU as much during the Six Nations. The union is holding firm and such discord is hardly conducive to high performance.
The issue is to be ironed out in the next PGA which comes into effect in 2024. After London Irish’s demise, PRL has seemingly got its wish of a 10-team league – though it was only in June 2021 that 14 was considered the optimum number – but the terms of the new agreement will go a huge way to determining how prolonged England’s decline is. The government has appointed advisers to oversee negotiations which are understood to have been split into three categories: “Stabilisation, Turnaround and Transform”. According to the RFU’s timeline, we have just entered the “Turnaround” phase, not that you would know it. Sweeney, for his part, said that “everyone is fed up” with the domestic structure when picking the bones out of the 2022 Six Nations, a second successive championship in which England managed only two victories.
RFU misguided
The day after that Six Nations the RFU issued a staggeringly misguided statement, insisting: “Eddie Jones is building a new England team and against a clear strategy we are encouraged by the solid progress the team has made.” The idea was to nip in the bud any speculation Jones might be sacked, to get ahead of the curve. All it did, however, was indulge Jones’s World Cup preoccupation further and alienate supporters who had grown tired of the Australian’s soundbites.
The RFU ought to have acted a year earlier if it was not going to back Jones through to France. In the 2021 Six Nations, played out in empty stadiums, England endured disappointing defeats by Scotland, Wales and Ireland. A month later, the RFU published details of its review with excuses ranging from fatigue, player and coach availability, and a bizarre claim that lower body strength needed to improve to negate breakdown indiscipline but there was not a single word apportioning any blame on Jones. The RFU would appoint “external rugby experts to inform all future debriefs” but they would stay anonymous and when that was subsequently put to Jones, his response was withering. “There’s only one head coach, mate.”
That may be so but there are 17 assistants, plus a handful of consultants, who Jones burned through including John Mitchell, who left in the summer of 2021, only a few months after signing a contract extension. A year later Sweeney insisted he never received any complaints about the head coach’s behaviour but by anyone’s standards it is an astonishingly high turnover. Indeed, he was as untouchable as ever.
Emboldened, too, proclaiming a “New England” after victories over the USA and Canada in July 2021 with a youthful squad, captained by Lewis Ludlow who won his first two caps and was not picked again. Indeed by now, Premiership clubs had grown tired of Jones’s capricious ways. Directors of rugby were at the mercy of his selectorial whims – in his seven years he picked almost 200 players in training squads – and their public relief at Borthwick’s appointment said everything about how relations had soured. One director of rugby was known to be furious at having to repeatedly pick up the pieces whenever Jones selected one of his youngsters only to cast them off within weeks.
That scattergun approach is better understood, however, when you consider the fate of the RFU’s pathway system. Between 2011 and 2017 England won the under-20s Six Nations five times but only once since. In 2018, Dean Ryan, then the RFU’s head of international player development, gutted Twickenham of popular age-grade coaches including John Fletcher, Russell Earnshaw and Peter Walton – then left a year later. It was a move that is understood to have stunned Stuart Lancaster, who held a similar role before he was made head coach and one from which England have not recovered. Their world Under-20 title in 2016 was a third in four years but the trophy cabinet has since been bare.
The demise of the A League, Sweeney’s decision to slash Championship funding and a rigid academy catchment system all combine to leave young players starved of game time. Those such as Freddie Steward have emerged in spite of the RFU’s pathway rather than because of it.
Writing on the wall
By the autumn of 2021 Jones had finally diluted the Saracens influence on his team, installed Courtney Lawes as captain and a November victory over South Africa, with Marcus Smith pulling the strings, strengthened his power base further. When a few months later Australia’s Samu Kerevi revealed how helpful Jones had been in his extracurricular consultancy with Suntory Sungoliath, the RFU had to just grin and bear it again, once more giving the impression it had no control over the head coach.
After the 2022 Six Nations, Jones had become brazen about his preoccupation with the World Cup but after a hard-fought series win in Australia – again led by Lawes – he was seemingly safe. England’s defeat at the start of the 2022 autumn to Argentina demonstrated that the victory over the Wallabies had been but a sticking plaster, however. Jones and his players sought to blame how long it takes to acclimatise from their club environments but the writing was on the wall. Jones tore strips off Max Malins for his body language but whereas shock and awe had once worked, his methods had worn thin.
Another comprehensive defeat by South Africa was greeted by vociferous boos, which sealed Jones’s fate. That ticket sales for the 2023 Six Nations were slow after a price hike had set alarm bells ringing at the RFU, Sweeney was under huge pressure due to the demises of Wasps and Worcester and had been skewered at a parliamentary inquiry. Jones’s comments a few months earlier in which he criticised the English game’s reliance on the private school system also went down horribly at Twickenham but Sweeney has never been able to justify sacking a head coach, whose obsession with the World Cup he had publicly endorsed and repeatedly indulged, nine months before the tournament began.
Borthwick bombs, Sweeney stays silent
Borthwick was always the No 1 candidate to eventually replace Jones. It suited the RFU to be seen to be courting Ronan O’Gara and Scott Robertson – just as it suited the pair themselves – and though Sweeney enlisted Nigel Redman to oversee “Project Everest”, speaking to no less than 67 coaches, Borthwick’s name was always top of the list. Sweeney had no issues letting it be known that in 2021 he met Shaun Edwards, while when Paul Gustard left as defence coach in 2018 Jones’s first choice to replace him was Andy Farrell. That both continue to ply their trade abroad is a damning indictment of the RFU. Instead, Sweeney turned to Borthwick, who had been earmarked for the role as successor early in Jones’s tenure despite lingering doubts from insiders over his suitability to the top job.
Borthwick would never admit it but he did not want the job last December. The plan was always to take over after the World Cup. One of his assistants in effect said so this summer and whether you believe he is suited to the job after only two years’ experience in the role at club level, there is no doubting he received a hospital pass. Still, he has handled it desperately.
Having recruited his Leicester coaching staff, Borthwick has taken the conservative approach, picked an ageing squad and is seeking to install a risk-averse gameplan that brought him success at the Tigers, but it is not working.
All the while, Sweeney – who earns £668,000 a year – stays silent. He is reeling from the mishandling of the decision to lower the tackle height in the community game, for Irish following Wasps and Worcester into the abyss and for the anticipated £40m shortfall in the RFU’s income this year.
The RFU council’s refusal to allow him to appoint an independent adviser to oversee governance reforms was tantamount to a show of no confidence and he is feeling the heat for the timing of his decision to sack Jones given results ever since. Supporters are making their feelings clear – it is unprecedented for so many seats to be empty as was the case against Fiji – and if England fail to advance from their pool in France there will be no alternative but to fall on his sword. It would make sense, wouldn’t it?
