Eddie Jones: England head into the ‘biggest’ test in rugby ‘knackered’ as Springboks remain the ‘great disruptors’
Eddie Jones on Ellis Park, the France-based players locked out of the shirt, and why Jack Willis has become the most damning case of the lot.
England walk into the cauldron of Ellis Park on Saturday to open the inaugural Nations Championship against the world champions, and they do it the hard way.
South Africa in Johannesburg, back-to-back William Webb Ellis Cup holders, on the ground where the last meeting between these sides in 2018 went to the wire and the hosts took the series 2-1 off an England team then coached by Jones himself.
England are knackered
The two nations last met in November 2024, the Springboks winning 29-20 at Twickenham. Steve Borthwick’s men arrive on a strong run. They also arrive, in Jones’s reading, worn down and thin on resources.
“England face the biggest test in rugby on Saturday. Ellis Park, away, against a Springbok side carrying the best win record the game has ever seen. And they go into it knackered, with a squad that needs depth more than it needs anything else,” Jones told Planet Rugby exclusively.
The depth is the whole point, because a chunk of it is sitting in France, locked out. Since 2012 the RFU has run a policy barring England-qualified players at overseas clubs from selection save in exceptional circumstances, and only weeks ago the union doubled down and confirmed it will not relax the rule despite mounting pressure. That leaves David Ribbans, Kyle Sinckler, Joe Marchant and, above all, Jack Willis on the wrong side of the door.
“England are not short of back-row riches. Far from it. But can they afford to ignore what sits overseas, not only in the back row but outside? Put Ribbans, Sinckler, Marchant, Lewis Ludlam, Jack Willis and Tom Willis into that squad and it goes up a whole new level.
“As a Test coach you learn one thing very quickly. It is rare that you ever get to pick your best 15, let alone your best 23. Maybe at the start of a World Cup, if you are lucky. Bluntly, you spend your life managing injuries, managing unavailabilities, and picking a side a long way short of your optimal one. South Africa and France have shown where the modern game has gone. Depth wins. This is a sport about 40 top-quality players now, and the inclusion of the French-based lads would lift England from a B-plus to an A-star.”
Springboks are the great disruptors
Would it swing Saturday? Jones is honest that it might not. The value, he argues, is in the long game, and the refusal to see that is what infuriates him.
“It might cost the head coach his job to say it, but the argument for exemption is enormous,” the Japan boss continued.
“Look at football right now. Every Japanese footballer at the World Cup plays overseas. They have gone from a top-40 nation to a top-16 nation because their players are in the best leagues, tested every week by the best players. Rugby has antiquated rules. We are still dragging the roots of our professionalism behind us.
“South Africa, the great disruptors, have not followed the herd. They broke the mould. Their players go overseas, come back, and educate the group, and the conveyor belt keeps turning. Yes, you have to win the Test in front of you. But Test rugby is the shop window, the product that attracts the eyeballs when your team wins, and it staggers me that the thinking behind these rules cannot see the obvious. A bigger pie gives you a bigger slice just as surely as a bigger cut of the pie you already have.”
PREM Rugby argument
Nor does Jones accept the Premiership’s central line of defence, that the rule exists to protect the English club game from a talent drain across the Channel. He argues the French system already does that policing for them. Top 14 squads of 35 are capped in the number of non-JIFF players they can carry, the academy-trained quota built precisely to stop a flood of overseas signings, and those rules have only tightened over the years.
“And I do not buy the argument that the Premiership needs protecting from a player drain,” Jones argues.
“The Top 14’s own rules guard against that. France caps how many non-JIFF players a club can field, and those salary and quota rules are only getting tighter. They cannot take an endless supply of Englishmen even if they wanted to. There is a natural ceiling on it. And the handful who do go, then come back, come home better men and better players. They raise the standard of everyone around them here. You do not weaken your league by letting your best test themselves against the best. You strengthen it the day they walk back through the door.”
His Exhibit A wears seven for Toulouse, and the timing could hardly be crueller for the RFU. Eight days ago Willis was named man of the match in the Top 14 final, a 28-20 win over Montpellier that handed Toulouse a fourth consecutive title, credited with 17 tackles and four turnovers in a brutal defensive display, several of them decisive as Montpellier laid siege inside the Toulouse 22.
He had already been man of the match in the semi-final. Across the regular season he topped the division’s back-rowers for metres carried and defenders beaten, and last October he succeeded Antoine Dupont as the Top 14’s Player of the Season. This is the player England are not allowed to pick.
“Study the jackal and you understand the man. He gets to the tackle a fraction before everyone else, works his feet past the ball, drops his hips and builds a base that two men cannot shift. He is not grabbing and hoping. He reads the picture. He knows when the ball is winnable and when to fold in and wreck the ruck instead, and that timing is the hardest thing in the game to teach.
“He has it in his bones. 17 tackles and four steals in a final, two of them on his own line with the match in the balance, that is a man bending a Test-level occasion to his will through the least glamorous work there is.”
Jack Willis is a complete forward
And Jones is quick to knock down the lazy read that Willis is a defensive specialist and nothing more.
“Do not tell me he only jackals. Watch him carry and attack. He has the footwork before the line that buys the half-yard, he keeps his feet through contact, and the ball lives in two hands so the offload is always alive,” he said.
“Toulouse players are very intelligent in attack; they carry with massive power, make a hole in straight line work, then they flood the space they’ve created, play through in straight lines, then shift wide when the defence collapses in and come back against the grain. Jack works brilliantly in that system.
“France has remade his body. The player who left England was carrying a bit of timber. The one out there now is lean, explosive, a proper athlete, and the jump in his power is enormous. The physicality over there has done that to him. Six tries in a season from a seven, top of your position for metres and for defenders beaten, that is not a fetcher. That is a complete forward.”
Rassie Erasmus rejects Springboks’ ‘soft underbelly’ notion but rues ‘big loss’
Verdict
What lifts him higher still, in Jones’s eyes, is the man beside him. François Cros, the France flanker who does the unseen graft at Toulouse, has become the perfect foil, the tackle count nobody notices and the ruck nobody credits, all of it clearing the ground for Willis to hunt.
“I called Underhill and Curry the Kamikaze Kids, and I was proud of that pairing. Willis and Cros are taking it to the next level as a partnership,” he said.
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“Cros does the work that never shows up on the highlight reel, and that is exactly what frees Willis to go and win you the game. Put a back-row relationship like that into an England shirt with an Underhill or Pepper and you change the whole character of the team.”
Then there is the intangible, the thing Jones went looking for in person.
“Give him the armband and he is leading the best side on the planet in Stade Toulousain. I went a year ago to Toulouse to watch my Japanese scrum-half, Naoto Saito. It was a day off. The players who were in, doing their strength and conditioning, were Cros, Flament, Willis, others. On their day off. Pros. That is a new level of professionalism, the most professional group around, with a great philosophy, a great heritage, an incredible culture, and beautiful simplicity.”
So does it need doing? “Yes. It does.”
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