Loose Pass

Editor

This week we will be mostly concerning ourselves with Eddie Jones, player power, extended seasons and truncated Lions tours.

Less is more

Rejoice! A seemingly immovable obstacle has been placed in the path of Premiership Rugby and their plans for an extended 10-month season.

Billy Vunipola is the latest England player to voice concerns over the prospect of, well, being flogged to death, and his plea for sanity has garnered good coverage across the sporting pages.

He’s probably within his rights to take his grievances even further: to the United Nations perhaps, or to the barricades, at least. Instead, he has offered to take a pay cut in exchange for playing fewer games.

And that’s as far as ‘player power’ extends. It’s a blunt instrument in the face of commercial needs and wants.

Indeed, it’s very unlike that Vunipola’s protest will hold back the tide for more than a second, not now that the British & Irish Lions appear to have fallen in line by announcing that they will shorten their tour of South Africa in 2021 to eight matches.

On that score, we can only hope that The Guardian has misquoted the unnamed Lions official who put the cut down to the fact that South Africa can’t muster “10 meaningful fixtures”. What a terrible slight on the great rugby nation of South Africa! What a terrible slight on the ethos of the Lions!

Is touring extensively and spreading the gospel of rugby no longer ‘meaningful’? Is it really now all down to the Test series? If so, let’s just play the three Tests and be done with it. Pick a scratch side on the back of domestic form, just like the Baa-baas. After all, it was the depth of prep that thwarted a 3-0 victory over the All Blacks, right? (Sean O’Brien, please report for an HIA.)

But back to the extended season if we really must, and we do sincerely apologise – regular readers will be forgiven for thinking that our record is broken.

Yet to our mind, it’s easy: playing fewer games would allow for more Test stars to be on show more regularly. This would attract bigger sponsors and larger audiences (on seats and in front of screens) on a more regular basis. This, in turn, would negate any financial losses incurred by doing away with, say, the Anglo-Welsh Cup and the Premiership play-offs.

Fewer but more ‘meaningful’ (if we really must) matches would demand our attention. They’d lean out of the fixture list and slap us across the face. We would attend without the need for gimmicks like double-headers and trips to Wembley and trips to the Olympic Stadium and trips to Philadelphia and weird tie-ins with St George etc.

Plus, and most importantly, it would allow the players to be at their best for longer. The game is getting more and more physical, and there’s no getting away from that fact. So allowing Test players little more than a month’s rest between seasons to reattach their limbs to their torsos is tantamount to abuse.

But with the blazers only able see our sport through the prism of money, let’s frame it like this: why do you think it is that Aviva had to be persuaded to extend their Premiership sponsorship deal against the its own judgement? It’s probably the same reason that the Six Nations is unable to find a title-sponsor to replace RBS.

Yes, the threat of Brexit is playing its nefarious part in those negotiations, but you can’t blame companies for wanting to back blockbusters over ‘B’ movies. Far too many stars are missing too many games – whether through injury or through rest – to make the season a proper, unadulterated spectacle.

Proper wonga won’t start flowing in until fixture lists are as lean and as mean as the players.

Vunipola was right to raise the spectre fewer appearances. He and his fellow internationals should now threaten not to appear at all. And should it come down to industrial action, Loose Pass will be right behind them.

Confidence trick

“These young players are delicate. They are like flowers; it is how much water, how much sunshine. If you give them too much too early they grow up too quickly and their base foundations aren’t strong enough. You have to quietly build them up over a period of time until they are ready.”

So spake Eddie Jones after noisily calling up Marcus Smith, 18, to his 33-man England training squad for a camp in Oxford. And this soon after Tom Curry became England’s youngest starter in almost a century, with Jones including him in a match-day squad that included 11 uncapped players.

Don’t get us wrong. We’re not doubting the likes of Smith and Curry. The have the talent to bag 200 caps between them, and we readily acknowledge that Jones referred to Smith as merely “an apprentice” who’s attending camp to “clean the boots and hold the bags”.

But Eddie’s invitations appear to be getting increasingly more scattergun of late. There’s now at least 80 players on his radar.

Like all Aussie coaches, he’s keen on eking out ‘big reactions’ and seeing how players bounce back from rejection, and we can only assume it’s in this vain that he sends the likes of Kyle Sinckler and Jonathan Joseph away “to work on their game”.

Most pundits had the pair down as nailed-on starters for the November Tests and the Six Nations; suddenly they’re not even cleaning boots or holding bags.

To our untrained eye, the only thing Sinckler and Joseph are missing from their game is self-belief, and we can’t quite fathom out how that will bloom in the absence of water and sunshine. It seems really harsh. Counter-productive, even.

Could Eddie’s own history of rejection be a factor in his increasingly ostentatious squad announcements? (Yep, here comes the cod psychology!)

It’s said that he’s never really got over being sacked by the Australian Rugby Union, and you sense he derives pleasure from plucking unknowns from his vast resources whilst his former employers are being forced to lay off entire teams. And there’s also something deeper than banter in his remark that Argentina’s visit in November represent England’s toughest assignment of the year, not least because the Wallabies arrive in town the following day.

Still, whatever is gnawing at Eddie’s soul is a fillip of England – he’s lost just one of his 20 games in charge.

But he’d be best advised to swot up on his botany if he wants to extend that sort of form. Australian flowers tend to be a great deal hardier than English roses. For every Jonny Wilkinson, there’s around 60 Paul Sampsons.

Remember him? Exactly.

Loose Pass is compiled by former Planet Rugby editor Andy Jackson