Eddie Jones retains passion and divisive presence ahead of Twickenham reunion
On 11 November 2026, Eddie Jones showed he still retained his passion and a capacity to divide opinion as he prepared for a reunion with former England players and staff at Twickenham while serving as Japan’s head coach.
Jones, now the Japan head coach, has been criticised for discarding players harshly during his Red Rose tenure and was sacked by the Rugby Football Union in late 2022; mixed emotions persist around his return to English soil after Japan’s 28-21 defeat in Cardiff, where he recounted a lift encounter and said: “This Welsh bloke came up to me and said: ‘You almost look human with your glasses on.’”
Under Jones England won 59 and drew two of their 81 matches, a 73% winning record the article says was superior to any other head coach before or since, including Sir Clive Woodward.
The Jones era involved relentless churn of backroom staff and harsh selection practices, prompting criticism from former players such as Danny Care, who compared it to “living in a dictatorship, under a despot who disappeared people.” During Jones’s spell 112 players were picked for England, with 14 earning a single cap and a further 18 only two caps.
Alex Coles, whose first three caps coincided with Jones’s farewell campaign in charge, described being used in the buildup to the 2022 autumn Test against New Zealand despite not being selected for the game and recalled the instructions he was given and the aftermath: “The chat was that they were going to try to get into our heads and wind us up. My sole role in the team session was to just try to wind the starters up. “I was this fresh-faced 22-year-old, scared of all the older heads like Mako Vunipola, Owen Farrell and everyone else. Eddie would run behind the defensive line and be like: ‘You’re not winding them up enough, you’re not getting in their heads.’ So, because I’d run out of ideas, I ended up coming around the side and tackling the third man in a caterpillar ruck. I then got piled on by about four or five of the starters on the floor. After that Eddie said I’d trained really well!”
Jones’s coaching upbringing is traced to Randwick, where he was coached by Bob Dwyer and played alongside Michael Cheika, and the piece states he prioritised resilient players over indulgence of novices; the article also names Tommy Freeman, George Furbank and Alex Mitchell among those Jones handed their first caps and who “have subsequently gone on to be influential Test performers.”
Will Joseph, who was given two minutes against Australia in Brisbane as a 20-year-old in 2022, is mentioned as set to feature along with Henry Pollock and Max Ojomoh in a reshuffled England starting XV this weekend, with the article asking of Joseph’s early selection: “Was he picked prematurely? Almost certainly.”
Jones’s legacy is described as disputed, with both he and his successor Steve Borthwick able to argue the national team depends on the strength of its development pipeline; the 66-year-old is quoted as saying the number of absolute world-class players England has produced since 2003 can be counted on one hand, and the piece concludes that his passion for rugby and his ability to divide a room remain unchanged as he heads into the Twickenham reunion.