Springboks: Felix Jones ‘is always a guy that blew my mind every day’
Springboks assistant Felix Jones and, inset, his former team and bandmate, Barry Murphy, of Munster and Hermitage Green
Sliding doors. In another life, Springboks assistant coach Felix Jones could have been part of the musical entertainment provided at last Wednesday’s latest Ireland team jersey launch in Dublin instead of being shacked up at a Johannesburg hotel plotting this Saturday’s downfall of the All Blacks in Rugby’s Greatest Rivalry series.
Around 2010, not long after his switch to Munster from Leinster, the then international full-back started jamming in Limerick spots such as The Curragower Bar and becoming bodhran player in Hermitage Green, the band with Barry Murphy, the ex-Munster and Ireland midfielder, on deck as its bass player and vocalist.
Jones stuck it out musically for about a year before his rugby commitments became sacrosanct, playing on with Munster and Ireland until a neck injury in October 2015 forced him to call it quits aged just 28.
Coaching soon became his thing. Rassie Erasmus invited him back into the Munster fold the following season in a tracksuit and the rest, as they say, is history, with Jones going on to assist the Springboks in their back-to-back Rugby World Cup wins, the British and Irish Lions series success, and perhaps now, a Greatest Rivalry triumph in the four-match series that is level at one-all heading to Soweto this Saturday.
“Every team is lucky to have him…”
Murphy hasn’t been following the ebb and flow of the current rugby series with forensic scrutiny; it’s a busy time of the year with the band and getting the kids back to school for the new term, so the minutiae of, say, Jones’ microscopic dissertation at a media briefing on alleged All Black illegalities is something he wasn’t up to speed on.
However, Murphy had nothing but the highest praise for a friend who was once the band’s dab hand with a double-ended stick tipper producing a deep, rolling, musical rhythm from a goat-skinned instrument.
Before playing to the shirt-launch audience gathered at the Guinness Open Gate Brewery that included Josh van der Flier, the 2022 World Rugby player of the year, Murphy shot the breeze with Planet Rugby about a friend he had bumped into 10 months earlier.
Murphy, you see, was on the Aviva Stadium pitch pre-game singing Amhrán na bhFiann and Ireland’s Call while Jones was in the coaching box, ready to assist Erasmus and co in their team’s 24-13 win.
Their next catch-up is inked for November 21 when the Springboks again visit Ireland but, in the meantime, the musician from a band whose hits include Make It Better gave a glowing appraisal of someone whose daily remit with the Boks is to make it better.
“Felix is always a guy that blew my mind every day with how much he applied himself and how hard he worked,” enthused Murphy. “You talk to anyone who has worked with Felix, whether it is sitting in the corner of a pub playing bodhran; he went and learned.
“He didn’t really play much until we started the band, and he learned to be a bodhran player pretty quickly. Watching his career grow so quickly, he just applies himself like someone I have never seen before, honest to God, and I know he is a guy that is so ambitious.
“He just throws himself into things and doesn’t think twice. Every team is lucky to have him, and what Rassie has done with him and tasked him with, it just seems like a beautiful combination, two minds that worked well together in Munster and he [Erasmus] saw the value in him.
“To win two Rugby World Cups is phenomenal and we boasted about it at the time, having two World Cups in our band, and yeah, who knows where he can go from here.”
Asked about the secret to Jones’ success as a rugby coach, the singer of crowd-pleasers such as Quicksand and Glow of the Kerosene Light added: “Just belligerent hard work, for want of a better word. Jerry Flannery (another Springbok assistant coach from Ireland) is probably the only other one I can think of with that mindset.
“You have heard a lot of people over the years talking about Jerry and how he applies himself, and the two of them together, they dovetail very well; they challenge each other unbelievably hard.
“So again, it didn’t surprise me with Felix. He is so ambitious, he is so hard-working, so determined, so competitive. Like, he wanted us to be the biggest band in Ireland for the year he was with us. So, yeah, that just embodies what he is like, so I’m in no way surprised by the coaching.
“I did think he would go into it because he was so disappointed to go out the way he did [an injury-enforced retirement]. I went into a bit of coaching myself at the time, and it gives you a lot of confidence when you retire from rugby; you go into something that you know so much about.
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“So when I saw him go into it, I thought it was quite a natural move. But yeah, the way he has worked hard has revolutionised the game in many ways. He has changed the way rugby is being played; he has changed the way rugby is being refereed. Just by how he influences players, he has actually changed rugby. That is phenomenal.
“He has changed the kicking laws; the whole kicking law that changed last year with contestables in the air and you have to make it a competition, you can’t chauffeur players back to block them – that’s Felix that changed that law. He wanted it to be constable.
“That was a huge part of his game (as a full-back) and something he brought to South Africa. I do think there are still a few teething problems with that part of the game, but from November, when everyone was complaining to World Rugby, to the summer series, rugby has never been as entertaining and as good from my point of view. A lot of that is down to Felix and how they have sped up the game.”
Jones wasn’t supposed to be contracted with the Springboks as they look to seal a Greatest Rivalry series success just over a year out from beginning their World Cup hat-trick bid. It was after RWC title win No.2 in 2023 that he threw his lot in with Steve Borthwick’s England, but that relationship never flourished, resulting in Erasmus inviting the Irishman to rejoin his Boks.
“I don’t know the ins and outs of what happened there (with England), but he obviously wasn’t happy, and it says a lot about a fella who is strong-minded, who knows what he wants and who knows who he wants to work with.
“It was difficult for him to travel over and back to South Africa with his young family for the first few years; I’m sure that was a reason to move closer to home (in Ireland with England), but he probably wasn’t happy with how they were playing the game, and yeah, he’s probably got the best of both worlds now. He has moved the family out to South Africa, and he is sure enjoying life out there with a winning team.
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“South Africa treat coaches who do well for them like Gods. Like, the way they talk about Rassie, Felix is right up there. He has dug into that side of things, really understands the culture and what it means to them – and that’s another side to Felix; he is an interesting character.
“It’s not just rugby for him. He gets stuck into the culture. When he came to Munster, he got into the community. He got to know the people not just involved in rugby; he got to know people in Limerick and people in Munster. He tapped into that and he is doing something very similar in South Africa.
“Rassie is a genius by all accounts. That’s how Jerry would describe him, that’s how Felix would describe him, all the Munster players (from 2016-2017), that’s how they described him. He values hard work and someone who puts themselves out there.
“Felix is a guy who will not just sit back and take a back seat role; he will lead from the front, and that is what Rassie wants. He wants to empower people around him, he wants leaders who stand up, and that is what Felix does.”
Murphy and Jones stay in touch. “I drop him a text every once in a while, about big games or when there is a Munster event or a gathering, a getting back together; he always makes an effort. He comes to one or two games a year down in Thomond Park, so we will always catch up for dinner and a few pints, but he is a busy man.
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“I am very lucky in certain ways,” added Murphy about his own premature retirement from playing rugby and how it has led to him staying involved but in a very different way. “I love music, I love sport and when I retired at 28, I was lucky to be able to do something like music.
“If I was a bit older retiring, this wouldn’t have happened and I probably would have been down the rugby route, but I have never looked back with Hermitage Green.
“It was probably hard for the first few years to miss out on certain milestones I wanted to hit in my rugby career, but music has been an incredible journey and now I get to do a bit of both, sing the national anthems for the Irish team and I’m here and there, kind of blending the music and the rugby. It’s a dream.”