England: Sir Clive Woodward slams Eddie Jones and the RFU after Marcus Smith substitution
It’s fair to say the knives are out for Eddie Jones among the English punditry after their late ‘defeat from the jaws of victory’ show against Scotland.
Marcus Smith‘s coach Tabai Matson was perplexed at the ‘pre-meditated’ substitution of the fly-half, who had scored all of England’s points before going off, while one other newspaper columnist said the defeat shoed the ‘split personality’ of England‘s current management regime.
Questions
Also questioned in just about every column, talk show, phone-in, cafe and bar the length and breadth of the UK was the decision to have Joe Marler hooking and throwing line-outs when Luke Cowan-Dickie was sin-binned.
But pulling the fewest punches of all was Sir Clive Woodward, who not only lambasted Jones but also the RFU, whom he accused of being too spineless to stand up to the notoriously waspish Jones.
“So why did Eddie Jones (take off Marcus Smith)? Will there be a no-holds-barred inquest at Pennyhill Park this morning? I suspect not,” wrote Woodward in the Daily Mail, a coach who spent quite a lot of his autobiography telling readers how dominant he was in corridors of power at Twickenham.
“There is nobody at Twickenham qualified to hold Eddie Jones to account in the rugby sense, he clearly has them all in his pocket. He can’t be questioned, which is a massive weakness.
“When he made a mess of the Six Nations last year the RFU apparently held a cosy little inquest with a collection of ‘rugby experts’, which was in itself an acknowledgement there was no one at Twickenham willing to question Jones.
“The report concluded England needed to get a ref involved at training to stem the flow of penalties and more involvement from sports psychologists might be beneficial!
“We weren’t allowed to know the identities of these experts and their qualifications to question what a high performing coaching set-up looks like, never mind running the rule over Jones and his decisions.
“In the absence of anybody from above questioning Jones, will the England senior players demand a few words with Eddie on Monday? The likes of Owen Farrell, if he’s in camp, Maro Itoje, Ben Youngs and increasingly Tom Curry.
“This is their team, they must take ownership. And those senior players should also admit to Eddie that they got things wrong as well. An adult conversation is badly needed.
“England could or even should have won what was always going to be a tricky game. This tournament isn’t over for them but they need to debrief honestly and look in the mirror — that is where the faults lie, nowhere else
“I’m not confident that any of this will take place.”
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