EDDIE JONES meets DAN BIGGAR: I’m no Jose Mourinho, I just want to do things differently and sometimes rugby bores me – here’s the truth about my coaching methods and what I learned from Louis van Gaal

As a former Wales player, I couldn’t have previously admitted this – especially when we’d play against his England or Australia teams – but I loved watching Eddie Jones’ press conferences. They were the highlight of my week.

As a Test player, I hated it when my team-mates would front up to the media and roll out boring, meaningless platitudes. Rugby needs characters and Eddie is certainly one of those.

It’s always entertaining when he sits down with journalists. Now I’m doing media work while still playing for Toulon, I’m trying to stick by the same attitude I’ve always had. I want to give my honest opinion, be fair and have a bit of fun!

Eddie has been shot down numerous times and he’s painted in many corners as a villain who plays a lot of mind games. His coaching methods have been criticised.

But I find him a fascinating character. I’ve often been the No 10 in the opposition who he has been trying to stop, so it was brilliant for me to sit down with him in a different environment and talk all things rugby without us both having to worry about what the other was thinking!

‘I haven’t set out to be the villain,’ Eddie tells me. ‘The media is a big part of the game and if there’s an opportunity to be able to help your team win, you want to do it. 

‘Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. You were that sort of player yourself. You’d do absolutely anything to win.’

Eddie’s no-nonsense methods, especially in his time with England, have seen him hit the headlines. In the past, he has been described as rugby’s equivalent of Jose Mourinho because some believe he can have an immediate impact on a team before his influence wanes.

Former England scrum-half Danny Care claimed working under Jones was ‘like living in a dictatorship’ and that ‘everyone was bloody terrified of him’.

Of the Mourinho comparison, Eddie says: ‘I don’t think that’s right. Look at the teams I’ve coached – Brumbies, Australia, England for seven years – that’s hardly a splash and go.

‘That (being compared with Mourinho) is the storyline and that’s all right. It’s a good one for people to tell but it’s not true. It sells books – have a look at Care.

‘I went to buy one of his books and you can’t – they’re sold out! You probably haven’t been dropped too many times in your life, Dan, but one thing I’ve learned coaching is as soon as you tell a player he’s dropped, he doesn’t hear the rest of the conversation.

‘They go into their own world. I know that myself. The first time I got sacked by Australia in 2005, it took me two years to recover until I was able to reflect and accept responsibility myself.

‘For the first two years, I wanted to blame everyone but I was the one in control. When you finish a player’s international career, it never ends well. I remember with Danny Care, we played Japan in 2018. We played bloody terrible and I had to bring all the reserves on early in the second half.

‘At the end of that game, I realised we’d been on a good run but I could feel it starting to drop off a bit. I had to refresh the team and Care was one to go. Not because he was a bad guy or a bad player, but because we needed something different at that stage. He doesn’t look back on that with kind thoughts.

‘I haven’t seen him. I always found him to be a really terrific guy. I thought we had a good relationship, so it came as a bit of a shock. These things happen.’

My conversation with Eddie makes me realise I’d have thrived under his guidance as we’re cut from the same cloth in terms of our competitiveness and desire to be the best every day. I must admit, though, I am a bit shocked when he tells me he’d have played me at inside centre!

Is Eddie bothered by what players think of him? ‘If I’m being absolutely honest, I don’t care,’ he says. ‘In society we’re going through a stage where everything is about being liked. That’s what Instagram and Facebook is about.

‘It used to be about being prosperous. All I want to do is my best. Sometimes I haven’t done that but if I’m happy with the job I’ve done, I can be happy. The reality of a team environment is that, mostly, it is uncomfortable.

‘Whenever you’re winning, you’ve just got to find a way to keep the flame burning.’

Eddie sees a parallel with Pep Guardiola. ‘Look at Manchester City,’ he says. ‘They’ve won everything for four years and then they maybe get a couple of things wrong. Now it’s, “Can the greatest coach in the world turn it around?”

‘One of the greatest meetings I had in my career was with Louis van Gaal, who coached all the big football clubs. He gave a simple coaching explanation.

‘He said if a circle is a vision of how you want to play, look at your players. You might realise you can only play half a circle. You try to build towards the full circle. That’s very true. You need to know how you want to play but understand the group you have and their capacity to do that.

‘Some coaches have the one style and they coach that wherever they go. I certainly have a strong philosophy about how I think the game should be coached.

‘I’ve coached teams to have a high kicking game, like England. I’ve coached Japan to have a high running game. I played for Randwick in Australia and we had a philosophy that we wanted to play on top of the opposition, flat to the line and keep the ball in play as much as possible. I still think that’s the way to play.

‘I went to a working-class school but I was lucky enough to play with a couple of blokes called the Ella brothers. Mark Ella was the Lionel Messi of rugby.

‘He was a freak. We won everything and because of that, the Ellas came into the Wallabies. That changed Australian rugby from more elitist to working class. That’s driven me to show that anyone from any walk of life can do what they want.

‘I want to produce a good team who play differently. The game needs teams to play in different ways. Sometimes, I must admit, I get bored now watching rugby. It’s so cookie-cutter. Everyone plays the same way.

‘The thing I love about the Top 14 is there are different styles. You can see every time Toulouse carry the ball, their intention is not to create a ruck. Their intention is to keep the ball alive and their support runners are so much more active as a result.

‘I want to produce a team like that. I’m 65 now and I’m still coaching. I’m very lucky.’

It has been nearly three years since Eddie left the England job. He’s now back with Japan again, after a second stint with Australia which ended badly at the 2023 World Cup.

In our conversation, he tells me he is still dreaming of being a cricket coach in the Indian Premier League, and why he has been wearing a Tottenham hat in the last few weeks to support his fellow Australian Ange Postecoglou, who is under pressure at Spurs.

His experience and range of storytelling is impressive and, in many ways, it is surreal for me to interview him because in 2003, when I was 14, I went on a trip of a lifetime with my late mum, Liz, to Australia to watch that year’s World Cup. I was in the stadium in Sydney when Jonny Wilkinson dropped the goal in the final to win the tournament for England.

The Australia coach that day? Eddie Jones.

In late 2022, Steve Borthwick took over from Eddie with England, and his side’s 26-25 win over France last Saturday has really thrown the cat among the pigeons for this Six Nations.

Eddie coached England to the 2019 World Cup final. He couldn’t quite get his team over the line but, for me, he has always been a brilliant coach and an intriguing character. ‘Everyone blew smoke up us in the week before the final,’ Eddie says. ‘You couldn’t help but hear it. I was trying to get the right balance, but I couldn’t quite do it and I take full responsibility.

‘I wanted to change the team, but I had a battle with the assistant coaches about that. Sometimes I’m the worst dictator because I don’t listen to myself! You can never get it back.

‘What I try to do is get the best out of each player, and for every individual there is a different way to do that. Can you make a horse run faster? Of course you can. But what you don’t want to do is push them too hard or be too soft on them. It’s about getting that balance right.

‘I can remember coming into the England side and there was one player I’d talk to and every time I’d speak to him, his eyes would roll.

‘He’d obviously never been coached. So, I had to find a different way to coach him. What I did when I needed to speak to him was I’d send him all the statistics and data of where he was and I’d ask him to come back to me a couple of days later. He’d identify and solve the problem.

‘Steve is in the third year of his job. He’s trying to put together his team. He’s at that tricky time when some of the senior players are going out (of the squad) and he’s got some young guys coming in who aren’t quite consistent enough.

‘It’s not easy. England got criticised for their display against Ireland but they had the courage to take the game to them. They couldn’t do it for long enough but they did it well for a period. I liked that sort of courage and that’s why they’ll be all right in the long run.’

Now listen to Dan Biggar’s full interview with Eddie Jones on the new series of A Load of BS on Sport via Spotify.