Stephen Jones Article

I spotted this on the Wasps supporters forum.  Although I'm no fan of Jones after his attempt to defend Sarries indefensible cheating, I did find myself agreeing with most of this.   What does everyone else think.  Don't be distracted by the term 'Disastrous Chiefs' in the title!

Fans Deserve Better Than Preposterous Reviews and Disastrous Chiefs

The review into Eddie Jones’ Six Nations campaign and the departure of Darren Childs badly exposed the colossal fault line in the English game

Stephen Jones
Sunday April 25 2021, 12.01am, The Sunday Times

Is there a vaccine that grants you immunity against becoming incandescent at the uselessness of the administration of rugby? What a sport we could have, but do not. It is like blundering football but without all the noughts.

The two key events of last week were the departure of Darren Childs, chief executive of Premiership Rugby, and the confirmation that Eddie Jones will remain as England head coach after a review procedure into the team’s awful Six Nations performance. That review hovered on the edge of the cliff of the utterly preposterous.

You may think that the two events were unrelated but they are irrevocably intertwined. And they exposed again the colossal faultline in English professional rugby — it must have a body to run only the professional game and another to run the community game, and until then and as the RFU straddles everything, it will remain horribly conflicted.

First shambles first. The supposed deficiency in the abilities of Childs, one of the least amenable men to media inquisition (and therefore to the rugby public) in the history of sport, was raised in The Times. “He did not understand rugby,” one club grandee said. Marvellous, just the man you need at the head of one of the biggest and most significant rugby organisations in the world. Is the hirer the fool, not the hired?

It was said that Childs was brought in because of his experience in the field of television, with new negotiations looming. As he leaves, the negotiation that he helped to push through for rights to the Premiership brought only one-third of the proceeds negotiated by the dynamic French clubs through their Ligue National de Rugby. He was a disaster.

Before Childs left, Nigel Melville joined the organisation. Melville is open and approachable. He must sense that Premiership Rugby is a group of inward-looking, often jealous and always-conflicted club owners — not to ignore their business and personal acumen — and it is a system from the Dark Ages. There is no independent expertise officially involved, no vision, just a frightened call for a closed shop to pickle the existing clubs as operations, in the vinegar of mediocrity. How gloriously the great Pat Lam of Bristol railed last week against this miserable move. Melville must surely be appointed as the Premiership Rugby chief executive.

And the intertwined drama? Eminent outsiders were apparently brought in for the Twickenham review of a Six Nations campaign in which England finished fifth, but stayed anonymous. No one appeared to grasp the implications of this for the prospects of a trusted review. How could these reviewers be so lacking in confidence that they did not dare put a name to their conclusions?

So what did we get from those conclusions? Clearly there had been input from the professor of excuses and public relations flannel at the University of Oxford. The recommendations contained a few volleys of quasi-scientific claptrap, other measures which the RFU and Jones should have brought in years ago, an exhortation for players to get bigger legs, but chiefly it was an astonishing barrage of lame excuses. For example Covid apparently hit only English rugby; other nations were not affected. And the whole thing was beautifully summarised by the headline in The Times: “Six Nations blame pinned on all but England coach.”

There was no mention of the poor and sometimes even random selection by Jones, mocked again during the brilliant Bristol Bears-Exeter Chiefs game on Friday evening, nor of the ceaseless parade of drive-by coaches and influencers who appear, nor of the obvious tactical confusion during games, nor of the yawning chasm at Twickenham of a heavy- hitting director of rugby.

This was when the faultline was exposed because the report then took aim at the biggest but easiest target: the Premiership clubs. There was consistent harping about what is clearly (and conveniently) seen by Jones and others as the malevolent influence of England’s great teams.

As blame was directed at everyone but to the subject of the process, the RFU called for a summer conference on “deeper alignment” between the clubs and the national team. It blamed the Premiership programme for player fatigue, no mention of the insanity of international fixture lists at the moment. I was also looking for the reference to the clubs being wholly responsible for the swingeing penalty count against England this year but at least on that score they escaped blame. So too, it seems, did Jones. Must have been the referee’s fault. As for this “deeper alignment”, if it means England are demanding just one more second of access to the players after the endless camps, if it means that the clubs will be without key players for one more second of action, and if it means that their modus operandi is continually to be insulted by Jones and others, then Premiership Rugby must rise up. Enough.

Deeper alignment? I would treat greater contact like a pernicious plague. The clubs have had their profitability, their appeal and their momentum wrecked by having their major assets removed so often. Followers and sponsors and head coaches of the clubs now hardly ever see their full team, while Jones gets the players one day in every four in a year. More yet? That is insanity and blatant overcoaching.

The report asks that clubs will be asked to “increase the speed of the game”. Rubbish. Any of the 12 teams in the Premiership or any team in Christendom can play in whatever style their coaches believe will enable them to win games given their playing strengths. Maybe London Irish, or Bath or Leicester Tigers would rather play a slower game, or play a game at different speeds. You cannot coach 13 teams (I add Saracens) at once.

The idea that there should be a single homogenised style, a clubby joint approach in which the England team and all the professional clubs join, is just anathema, too boring for words and box-office disaster.

The clubs may be badly run as a collective, but as individual sporting entities on the field they are wonderful. Their coaches and players give Jones a ready-made, highly motivated group of players who deserve less of his time and way more of his respect. In the wake of Childs, Premiership Rugby needs to look up, for a change, and assert itself. England must stop making excuses. The sport’s followers deserve so much better.

You sure about this new book, Eddie?
From the man who coached England to fifth place in the Six Nations comes a new book. Pan Macmillan announced on Friday that it would be publishing Leadership by Eddie Jones in November. “England rugby union’s head coach gives the full insight into what it takes to be a great leader,” runs the blurb. Lucky he has so many from the England squad to write about.