The players' candid verdict has finally emerged, albeit slowly. "It was like living in a dictatorship," Danny Care writes in his new autobiography, Everything Happens for a Reason, serialized in the Sunday Times. "Remember what it felt like when someone was being bullied at school and you were just glad it wasn’t you? That was the vibe." The England regime he refers to—shockingly—was that of Eddie Jones. According to Care, Jones’s players sometimes felt "like characters in a dystopian novel." "Everything’s a test," they would whisper, bracing themselves for what was to come. "Did Eddie rule by fear?" Care rhetorically asks. "Of course he did; everyone was bloody terrified of him." This sounds more like a disgraced boarding school from the 1970s than a professional sporting environment, which is how it seemed to those on the front lines. This raises numerous questions ahead of England’s game against Australia this weekend, who are coincidentally also recovering from Jones’s methods after failing to make the knock-out phase at last year’s World Cup. The most crucial question is how and why it took so long for those within the camp to speak out.
No contracted player with political savvy would publicly criticize their current head coach. Speak your mind, and the exit door is right there. But what about Jones’s employers? Those in high-level positions within the Rugby Football Union who knew the truth but chose to ignore it for the sake of corporate diplomacy should be ashamed. The governing body claims it received no formal complaints about Jones. "Some of [the analysts] ended up as shells of their former selves," Care writes. This scandal makes the judgment of those who reappointed Jones for a second stint (before finally sacking him in December 2022) even more questionable.
However, Care, who played 101 Tests for England and is widely regarded as a decent, approachable person, also delivers his verdict on the mood under Stuart Lancaster in the months leading up to the 2015 Rugby World Cup, when England became the first host nation to bomb out in the pool stages. Care liked Lancaster, with whom he had a long history, but his professional assessment is painful. "The Stuart Lancaster regime was supposed to be about the fine details and leaving no stone unturned, but it had got so many big things wrong." He talks about the squad constantly feeling "like they were being judged" and the visible strain on the man in charge. "The players knew we were in trouble just by seeing the toll the responsibility was taking on him. He looked like a ghost, as if all the life had been sucked out of him."
The moral? Top-level team sport can be as mentally toxic as any workplace. You may represent millions when you wear the national shirt, but ultimately, one individual has an unbreakable hold over you. If Care’s testimony is to be believed, the players often struggled to relate to either Lancaster or Jones and spent as much time rolling their eyes as they did applauding their leaders’ tactical and technical insights. Only in private, though. Speak out, and you risk losing thousands of pounds in income.
On the flip side, players who are not selected are famously never happy. They go and moan over a sappuccino in their local cafe, just like anyone else. The illusion of a perfectly harmonious squad tends to be just that. Care protested to Jones when he was dropped in 2018 and ended up not playing for England for another four years. This makes it harder to argue that the scrum-half’s complaints would have been more valid if they had been made while he was still an active England player rather than to help sell his autobiography.
But at least his testimony is out now. And people wonder why English rugby never seems to add up to the sum of its parts. Jones, as it happens, is in France this week with Japan and will presumably have something to say in response when he feels the time is right. There is already a line in his own autobiography that comes to mind. "My observation was that when a group of Englishmen get together they’ll often behave like they’re back in school," wrote Jones. "The Japanese and English are very similar in that there is always a facade of politeness to their interactions. But there is no doubt that, beneath the surface, the English and the Japanese both like to bitch about everyone around them." One person’s truth can be someone else’s wishful thinking. "The English in general, not just in sport, want to be told what to do," added Jones, never one to sidestep a cultural stereotype. "They like clear instruction." Care’s view would seem to suggest the exact opposite. But surely we can all agree that players, regardless of nationality, creed, or color, deserve to be treated with fairness, courtesy, and respect. The days of coaches who believe otherwise are long gone.
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