| It has taken a while to trickle out but the full and frank verdict of the players is finally in. “It was like living in a dictatorship,” writes Danny Care in his new autobiography, Everything Happens for a Reason, serialised in the Sunday Times. “Remember what it felt like when someone was being bullied at school and you were just glad it wasn’t you? That was the vibe.” The England regime to which he was referring – shock, horror – was that of Eddie Jones. According to Care, Jones’s players felt “like characters in a dystopian novel” at times. “Everything’s a test,” they would whisper to each other, trying to steel themselves for whatever was about to follow. “Did Eddie rule by fear?” asks Care rhetorically, at one point. “Of course he did, everyone was bloody terrified of him.” |
| If all this sounds more like a now-disgraced boarding school in the 1970s than a professional sporting environment that’s often how it seems to have felt to those at the sharp end. Which raises any number of questions before this weekend’s England game against Australia, who are coincidentally also still recovering from a dose of Jones’s own-brand medicine after failing to make the knock-out phase at last year’s World Cup. The most important being how and why it took so long for those inside the camp to tell it like it was. No contracted player with an ounce of political nous, clearly, is going to criticise his current head coach in public. Speak your mind and, generally, the exit door is just over there. But what about Jones’s employers? Those in high-level positions within the Rugby Football Union who were aware of the truth but glossed over it in the name of corporate fence-sitting should be hanging their heads in shame. The governing body, however, claims it received no formal complaints about Jones. “Some of [the analysts] ended up as shells of their former selves,” writes Care. It is a scandal and makes the judgment of those who reappointed Jones for a second stint (before finally sacking him in December 2022) all the more questionable. Hold on a moment, though. Care, who played 101 Tests for England and is widely regarded as a decent, approachable sort, has also been delivering his verdict on the mood under Stuart Lancaster in the months leading up to the 2015 Rugby World Cup, when England became the first host nation to bomb out in the pool stages. Care liked Lancaster, with whom he went back years, but his professional assessment now is wince-inducing. “The Stuart Lancaster regime was supposed to be about the fine details and leaving no stone unturned, but it had got so many big things wrong.” He talks about the squad constantly feeling “like they were being judged” and of the visible strain on the man in charge. “The players knew we were in trouble just by seeing the toll the responsibility was taking on him. He looked like a ghost, as if all the life had been sucked out of him.” The moral of the story? Top-level team sport can be as mentally toxic a workplace as any. You may be representing millions of people whenever you pull on the national shirt but, ultimately, one individual has a non-negotiable hold over you. If Care’s testimony is to be believed, the players often struggled to relate to either Lancaster or Jones and spent as much time rolling their eyes as they did applauding their leaders’ tactical and technical insight. Only in private, though. Speak out and you risk depriving yourself and your family of thousands of pounds in lost income. The flip side of it all, of course, is that players who are not getting picked are famously never happy. They go and moan over a sappuccino in their local cafe, just like anybody else. The illusion of a perfectly harmonious squad tends to be exactly that. Care did protest to Jones when he was dropped in 2018 and ended up not playing for England for another four years. Which makes it harder to argue that the scrum-half’s complaints would have been even more valid if they had made while he was still a serving England player rather than to help flog his autobiography. But at least his testimony is out there now. And people wonder why English rugby never seems to add up to the sum of its parts. Jones, as it happens, is in France this week with Japan and will presumably have something to say in response when he feels the time is right. There is already a line in his own autobiography, however, which springs to mind at this juncture. “My observation was that when a group of Englishmen get together they’ll often behave like they’re back in school,” wrote Jones. “The Japanese and English are very similar in that there is always a facade of politeness to their interactions. But there is no doubt that, beneath the surface, the English and the Japanese both like to bitch about everyone around them.” One person’s truth can be someone else’s wishful thinking. “The English in general, not just in sport, want to be told what to do,” added Jones, never one to sidestep a cultural stereotype. “They like clear instruction.” Care’s view would seem to suggest the exact opposite. But surely we can all agree that players, regardless of nationality, creed or colour, deserve to be treated with fairness, courtesy and respect. The days of coaches who believe otherwise are long gone. Marler and me Good luck to Joe Marler as he disappears over the international rugby horizon. What a rollercoaster ride it has been for England’s erstwhile loosehead prop, right up until the end. It might not have been the smartest move to antagonise pretty much the whole of New Zealand just days before the All Blacks game at Twickenham but, then again, he has always been his own man. He deserves credit for having raised awareness about rugby players’ mental health and will also go down as a flinty, strong scrummager and defender who never took a backward step. It is also fair to say he didn’t always see eye to eye with some rugby correspondents, not least the time I took issue with him, as Harlequins captain, over the unhelpful one-word answers he had just given a couple of callow younger journos at a pre-game press conference. “It’s like broccoli,” he replied, staring me down. Eh? “I don’t like broccoli.” You could have had long odds back then on him becoming a podcast star and chatshow darling but Marler has never been just your ordinary Joe. Memory lane |
| A synchronised celebration from the All Blacks after completing a 14-3 win over Ireland at Lansdowne Road in January 1954. It was New Zealand’s second Test of an arduous tour that involved 36 matches and had begun on 31 October with a 24-0 win over the Southern Counties and also included internationals against Wales, England, Scotland and France. The All Blacks, captained by Bob Stuart, were beaten by Wales 13-8 and France 0-3 but won similarly low-scoring matches against England (5-0) and Scotland (3-0). And after they’d finished the European leg of their tour, at the end of February, they were off to Canada and the US in early March, for four more matches, all of which were won comfortably. And finally … This Friday should reveal whether New Zealand’s win over England at Twickenham was an encouraging step in the right direction or a temporary blip. Ireland have been waiting for a reunion with the All Blacks ever since last year’s epic World Cup quarter-final in Paris and will be bang up for this contest. Scott Robertson’s team, minus Codie Taylor and Beauden Barrett, are likely to find their opponents in seriously uncompromising mood and facing them under the Friday night lights in Dublin will do little to minimise the challenge. There are some big games to come this autumn but this one could be the pick of them. Still want more? British and Irish Lions eye flutter on Las Vegas match in 2029, writes Gerard Meagher. Read Robert Kitson on where it all went wrong for England against the All Blacks. Andy Bull ponders the justification for subbing Marcus Smith. And Martin Pengelly meets possibly the best player in US rugby history. |
