This capacity to win with serial consistency is earning Eddie Jones comparisons with the best of those who have managed in the round ball form of football. Though it is early to begin considering symmetries with Sir Alex Ferguson, whose far greater challenges included inheriting a failing team and doing what he always described as a “salesman’s job” in the transfer market, some equivalent traits are emerging.
A watchmaker’s obsession with every last second of the battle, of course – “sometimes you get beaten but you don’t get beaten. That’s when you know you have got a good team,” as Jones put it late on Saturday night – and that capacity to play the media like a fiddle, as well as a fiendish absorption with sports science, too.
Ferguson’s reverence for science and ideas, rooted deep in his working class consciousness, even saw him look to seek ocular specialists to ensure his players were seeing the ball properly and Jones has been drilling for some time into the finer points of ‘tactical periodisation’ - travelling to Qatar to meet one of the developers, Spaniard Alberto Mendez-Villanueva, who has worked with Jose Mourinho and Andre Villas Boas.
It is an abstruse specialism, in which psychological and physical approaches are applied to each of the four scenarios of a game – offensive and defensive organisation, the transition from attack to defence and from defence to attack – and which Jones sees as developing the last quarter fitness which proved to be the difference in the enervating finale against Wales.
The mathematics of his players’ work rate obsesses Jones, too. Ben Youngs revealed two weeks ago that they are allowed three seconds on the floor from a tackle or at the breakdown before coaches get on their back – the so-called ‘bounce time’ – but this is still not good enough for him. Only on Saturday, Jones was discussing the gap between England and the All Blacks which still exists where that signifier is concerned. The stats show England are still seven per cent below New Zealand.
“We are still not where we need to be, [even though] the improvement has been enormous,” said Jones. “I think some of the blokes had a cup of tea and a scone with jam and cream before they got off the ground. It was terrible. Just go back and have a look at some of the early tapes and you will see it.” Look away Stuart Lancaster.
Jones’ introduction of New Zealand to the conversation - and his unflinching “Yes” when asked if, subconsciously, he calibrates everything against a measure of what it would take to beat the Kiwis - provides another echo of Ferguson. In every conversation with him it was a given that Manchester United went to work each day aiming to be the world’s best.
Jones is exceptional, if not unique, among England coaches, in any sport, in his willingness to state the same. He was withering, late on Saturday, when asked if the win in Cardiff might influence Warren Gatland’s British Lions selection. “I’ve got no interest in the Lions. I’m not coaching the Lions. Ask Warren, don’t ask me. Seriously, I’ve got no interest. I’ll fly down there and have a look at a Test and have a bit of lamb…” Arrogance? Oh, absolutely.
He and Ferguson share that tendency to retain a distance between themselves and their players; to protect their own absolutely in the public space, yet to use that space to send a message. Dylan Hartley was withdrawn painfully early on Saturday and the head coach’s observations as to why was brutally bereft of sentiment. “Every decision is made on the ability of the player to work. When they start to drop off - we have parameters for how quickly they get off the ground - and when they start getting slow off the ground we make a change. It’s got nothing to do with anything else.”
There are clearly precious few teacups thrown by Jones – and Ferguson was not a man of serial rage, either, despite some characterisations. To have heard England players’ disclosures about the half time intervals on each of the past weekends is to understand that. It means that desire, not fear, drives the closing moments. Ferguson’s version of tactical periodization was to create the conditions of entering the closing stages in arrears and to train them for that psychological pressure. “Late goals are no accident,” he once said.
“How many games out of our last 15 wins have we won in [the] last 20 minutes,” Jones asked, after the try at the death which left Wales so punctured and devastated. “That's not by coincidence. It's because we train to win those last 20 minutes…” It was ‘character’, Jones said. “And grit. And belief and believing we can win. And we're fit. We’re a fit side now.”
He is a more assured operator in the media environment than Ferguson – verbally sharper, funnier and blissfully free of the paranoia about the press which beset Ferguson by the end. Of course, the Glaswegian’s descent into deep suspicion about United’s chroniclers was borne of having being written off when Jose Mourinho arrived to the Premier League and seemed set to take his crown. He survived both Mourinho and the bestowment of Arab riches on Manchester City, winning his last title by 11 points – more or less roughly the same lead which is fuelling talk of Antonio Conte’s genius quality, now.
It is when Jones hits a bump in the road - as he will - that we will learn how far the comparison can be extended. You suspect that the media briefings will be considerably shorter and the one liners in shorter supply. The more swagger you give out in the good times, the more collateral damage you risk in the bad.
We will see. For now, there are two weeks to prepare for Italy, with some kind of quiz called ‘Changing Houses’ being lined up for the players, as well as a line-out session in Hyde Park and possibly some sudokos. Jones is preparing something tactically different for Saturday week at Twickenham because he says he believes in constant evolution. He said on TV that his players would take Italy ‘to the cleaners’ and was later asked if he wanted to tone that down. “That’s all right, isn’t it?” he replied, grinning. “That’s not bad.”