Always a Wasp

Coventry Observer article quote Lee "Joe [Launchbury] did some units and skills this week, he’s probably a couple of weeks away"

Thanks. The problem I had was that I could switch the reflink to FM radio and it worked, but back to reflink mode and heard nothing on any of E1 to E4. On the other radio I checked that I could get normal radio, but scanning from 60 up to 70 found nothing.
Will try again tomorrow when Leicester's run is ending.

Excellent news to hear

I also think that the 'casual fan' who was primarily a soccer one, was drawn in when we moved to Coventry. I know quite a few who bought STs for several seasons. When the gloss started to fade on Wasps performances and the fortunes of CCFC took an upturn and then a return to our stadium, they have little interest in rugby now and have subscribed in numbers to STs for the soccer club.

Coventry in terms, of sport was primarily a soccer city - this was aligned to the significant heavy industries manufacturing base in the area.

Yes - Coventry Rugby Club were a top flight club years ago, but with the advent of the professional era, that essentially saw them slip down to the second echelon.

If the Sky Blues did make it back to the hallowed land, then there would be 30K attending every home game.

Wasps fans from the old heartlands - Repton Ave, Loftus Road and Adams Park, are feeling more and more disenfranchised by the club.

Communication from the Club is very poor. I had a quick look at the website today and there are zero match reports linked to results page.

The club has to seriously rethink it's offering to fans past and present, otherwise rugby will become non significant at the CBS.

+10, at least

For starters:

Drop the en-er-£$%^-mundo trumpet (it is like the announcer hits a break point in whatever he is watching and leans over and hits the trumpet button, there is little evidence he is actually watching the match), put useful information on the big screen (at the Gloucester match there were 3 penalties awarded for knock-ons), give prompt details about substitutions. Make sure the players come round at the end of the match, this seems to have returned recently but for a while it was "match over - off we go". Update the web-site, with squad information.....

Other gripes, giving us credits to use where we have to phone up to use them, how much time do they think we each have free in a day?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/rugby-union/59464498

Most of them cleared to come home

https://www.premiershiprugby.com/watch/full-match-bath-rugby-v-wasps-round-7 is working at the moment

Eddie Jones: Blazing rows, brutal texts and airport firings – why it’s so hard to work for England rugby coach
Owen Slot speaks to backroom staff and players about why the coach, who led England to their joint worst-ever finish in the Six Nations, is such a hard taskmaster

Friday October 29 2021, 6.00am, The Times

It was one day last summer that settled it for John Mitchell and led to him becoming the latest coach to leave Eddie Jones’s England.

Mitchell was with the other coaches at the Lensbury Club, where the England team were based for their two summer Test matches. On a day off, he was intending to go and watch his son, Daryl, a professional cricketer who plays for New Zealand and Middlesex.

As Mitchell was leaving, though, he was caught by Jones. Jones asked him where he was going and Mitchell replied: “I’m going to the cricket.” Jones told him: “No, you’re not.” Mitchell’s response was that it was a day off. Jones’s response was to tell Mitchell that, actually, he had some work for him to do.

This stand-off did not go well. The result was that Mitchell did indeed go to the cricket. On July 23, the RFU then released a press statement saying that, after the November series, Mitchell would be leaving his role as England’s defence coach. In fact, Mitchell didn’t even hang on that long; within days, he was in his new post at Wasps.

Mitchell’s departure is just the latest. It may seem strange that a coach, such as Mitchell, at the pinnacle of the game with England, might elect to leave to work in club rugby. With Jones’s England, though, this isn’t unusual at all.

England’s record in the Six Nations earlier this year, where they finished fifth, losing to Scotland, Wales and Ireland, equalled their worst ever in the competition. However, at a time when they would benefit from some continuity in the coaching group, England are just about to start working with their third defence coach in the six years of Jones’s tenure. In the four years up to the 2019 World Cup, they used five different sports psychologists.

In every department, the turnover is high: coaches, doctors, psychologists, physios, analysts. The fact is that the churn of Jones’s staff is unmatched anywhere in the world game and the reason is clear. Working for Jones is a relentlessly intense experience and Jones can be a brutal employer.

One analyst was sacked as the squad were going through Faro airport in Portugal. Dean Benton was recruited from Australia as head of sports science; in one staff meeting, Jones’s ire was such that he sent Benton out of the room, like a naughty schoolboy from class. Benton left and now has a similar role with the Wallabies. Good people are lost this way.

“Verbal abuse, pressure, belittling,” is how one former employee described it.

“Brutal, rude, aggressive,” were the words of one player describing the way Jones treats his staff.

This is another player: “We all know how hard Eddie is and how tough it is. Staff openly talk about it. You can feel the tension in the environment if one of the department heads had just had it in the neck, especially in the medic group. The physio room is the social hub and if they are a bit down, you’d be: ‘Eddie’s on one, is he?’ And they’d be: ‘Yeah yeah.’ ”

Initially staff started disappearing in the summer of 2017, 18 months into Jones’s reign: a coach, an analyst, a psychologist, a senior communications officer. All of this was noted by the players. For a while, the players had a song about this, written by Jonny May, in which they would recall the missing. Soon there were too many to name and, really, it wasn’t funny any more.

In those days, the RFU used to name all the assistant England staff in the Twickenham match-day programmes, but this soon stopped because this just told the story of Jones’s revolving-door policy.

Three things have become clear since The Times started investigating this story.

One: of the multiple sources that we spoke to, even Jones’s staunchest critics spoke of what a great coach he is; they agree that he understands the game as well or better than anyone else they have ever worked with and that the education he provides is unmatched. That is the reason some staff hang on as long as they do.

Two: there are those who argue that, at the top of international sport, tough and unforgiving is how the environment has to be. This is Paul Gustard, who did three years with Jones: “I am sure that there are people that have been unhappy but I am not one of those. He has a certain style and a certain way. That’s him. My experience was very, very positive. I owe a lot to him.”

Three: those who criticise Jones are loath to be mentioned by name. This is because some have signed non-disclosure agreements and others because rugby is a small world and it does no one’s future any good to be outspoken about such a senior, influential figure. “But this needs to be said,” one said. “This story should be told,” said another.

There is another perspective, here, which is Jones’s. He is always looking to improve and that, he believes, means always looking for staff who may be able to do things better than those already in the job.

Furthermore, he doesn’t believe in a comfortable working environment but thinks that you need disruption for teams to move forward. If you can live with being uncomfortable, he says, then you will produce your best work and if you cannot live with it, then international rugby probably isn’t the place for you.


How is he with the players? He had a fearsome reputation before he arrived as England’s head coach but has since acknowledged that the modern generation won’t respond to hard, old-school management methods.

Nevertheless, this is how Dylan Hartley recalled it in his autobiography, The Hurt: “You could never relax into the rhythms of the England camp and enjoy the experience. If you can’t cope, you don’t stay.

“I went through a phase of dreading going away and I know other England players felt similarly . . . we were bonded by the ripples in Eddie’s character and constrained by the ludicrous convention that athletes, like Victorian children, should be seen and not heard.”

Hartley used to relish the times when he could retreat to his room. “Yes, some people hide in their rooms,” another player said. “You speak to the guys from Scotland, Ireland and Wales and they have such good fun. I wish we could be more like that.”

“Everyone has heard the scare stories and you don’t want to get on the wrong side of him,” wrote Mike Brown in his column in The Mail on Sunday, recounting how he once contested an assessment Jones had made of his game and that Jones’s response was a volley of f-words and the end of his England career.

Danny Care, Brown wrote, was also frozen out at the end of 2018 after challenging Jones’s opinion.

Hartley recalls Marland Yarde arriving at England’s Pennyhill base, “a bit bruised and battered”, after driving down from playing a club game: “Eddie greeted him with a bright ‘How are you feeling, mate?’ and the conversation quickly went downhill. ‘Oh, a bit tired.’ ‘Fuck off, mate.’ ‘What?’ ‘If you’re tired, fuck off. I don’t want tired players here.’ As you can imagine, their cosy fireside chat echoed around the halls within minutes.”

One player said: “The way he screams at players in training isn’t good. Sometimes it’s almost like he wants to push the player to either snap back — so it’s easier to move them along — or just grind them down to the point of them not wanting to be there.

“Also, the text messages: it’s not good for an athlete in the grind of a season if you come off the pitch from a club game and the first message you see — he’s clearly texted during the game — is telling you you’ve blown an opportunity. It’s basically saying ‘You’re shit’ in a one-liner. That’s not good for people’s confidence or wellbeing, especially if you’ve just lost a game or not played as well as you wanted to.

“You just end up worrying about what he’s thinking. In mid-game, I find myself worrying about doing certain things or expressing myself or being able to play with freedom because I’m worried about the message I’m going to get from him.

“I’ve been sat in pre-match food with my club and I’ve got a message telling me I wasn’t going to be selected for the next England squad — when you’re literally about to go and play a game. Can you imagine how mentally tough that is? When we told the other England coaches, they were fuming.”

And that is just the players’ side of it. They all agree that the coaches and the staff have a harder time still. Steve Borthwick was the coach who had the worst of it, burdened with the role of Jones’s long-term punchbag. As Jones’s coaching coordinator, he was regarded as having the toughest job because he had the greatest demands placed on him. The coaches used to refer to those moments, when Jones turns his ire on you, as “getting an Eddie spray”. It was Borthwick who received the most spray. His four-and-a-half year tour of duty is regarded as a heroic feat of endurance.


Borthwick left in the summer of 2020. Then, following a disastrous Six Nations earlier this year, the RFU conducted a review in which the conclusions made no reference to staff turnover or named any coaches as not being up to the mark. A fortnight after the review, though, Simon Amor, the attack coach, had gone and it was announced that Jason Ryles, the highly-rated Australian skills coach, who had been stuck on the other side of the world due to Covid, would not be coming back either. Three months later, after Mitchell had also left, Jones’s four-man team of assistants was down to one.

“He demands a lot from people,” said one former staff member, “and the question is: is it too much? Does it adversely affect their confidence and enthusiasm? Eddie’s is quite a tough school. The Aussie banter is bone deep; is it meant to hurt or to build character?

“For me, the line was crossed too many times. It becomes all about self-preservation; you keep your head down to survive. The texts to me overstepped the line. I’ve saved some of them. He would be derogatory about other coaches in texts to me too.” Another said: “It was an intense environment. Some people last and enjoy it, others make a different decision. I felt it wasn’t sustainable.”

Some also noted Jones’s dismissiveness of the English, which is strange, given they are his employers and his team. “I always felt there was a slight hatred to the English,” one former staff member said, “references to what we were like as a country. We’re this, we’re that.”

In his own autobiography, Jones writes that: “The Japanese and the English are very similar in that there is always a facade of politeness to their interaction . . . there is no doubt that, beneath the surface, the English and the Japanese both love to bitch about everyone around them.”

With the England team, in particular, Jones is wary of the private-school core of the side and is concerned that the players have had it too easy and that a system is in place where the financial rewards come so quickly to them in the professional game that it could dull their appetite.

“He would reference the English a lot,” one player said, explaining that Jones was concerned about players being distracted by spending time doing commercial work. “Then we would always see him doing it — especially before the World Cup. You would think: hang on, you always bang on about only focusing on England, but you are doing that [other work]. Contradictory.”

Other coaches say that all the hard work, long hours and relentlessness might be worthwhile if there was a light side too. Jones can be funny and excellent company, but rarely when he is on duty.

On the other hand, there are those who believe in his methods. When Gustard left Jones’s set-up in 2018 to join Harlequins, it seemed a strange move, coming only a year before the World Cup. Yet Gustard says that, for family reasons, he wanted a job with less time away from home.

“It wasn’t that I didn’t enjoy working for England,” he said. “The learning with Eddie was immense. There was no falling out. I have nothing but admiration for Eddie.

“Almost everyone would say that he is the deepest-thinking coach you’ll come across. He is the one person that continually looks how he can change the game. He is the most proactive in asking questions and challenging the status quo.

“Without doubt, he challenges you and that can make things uncomfortable. There were times when we had strong discussions. Without doubt, feedback was constant, daily, twice a day at times and Eddie doesn’t mince words. Instead of saying things like I would in 20 words, he might say it in three and [get] straight to the point.

“We had an expression with England called ‘critical candour’. Be candid about your opinion. That sits uneasily with some people; with me, I understood it and, for the most part, responded positively to it.”

These are now crucial times for England. They are two years out from the World Cup and, after the fallout of last summer, Jones has another new coaching team assembling: a new group who have got to get to know each other, work out how to work best with each other and how to get England to the top of the world.

England are thus charging on in the same manner: changing everything around Jones but never touching Jones himself. At no point, in the conclusions to the RFU’s post-2021 Six Nations review, was there any reflection upon the environment that Jones creates for his coaches to work in. Neither did they question Jones himself. While the team around him are expendable (and therefore expensive), Jones is the one constant who appears to have the firm backing of his employers. He is a hugely convincing advocate. Whenever his stewardship looks set to hit the rocks, he manages to convince the RFU that he can steer them to safety.

The RFU thus remains convinced that he is the right man. Yesterday, in response to this article, an RFU spokeswoman said: “Eddie is widely regarded as one of the leading international rugby coaches in the world. International coaching in the elite game requires a unique super high-performance, competitive environment and the demands of this can be challenging.

“There are many coaches and players who have worked with Eddie that speak very highly of him, his commitment and work ethic, and value the experience. While the demands of an international environment are not for everyone, many have gained from Eddie’s knowledge and experience and furthered their career as a result of learning from him. Steve Borthwick has worked with Eddie in a number of roles since 2007 and he was part of the England coaching team with Eddie for five years; they continue to have a strong relationship and there are many other examples of long-standing relationships. Eddie visited Steve and Leicester Tigers every four weeks over the summer and describes Steve’s coaching as outstanding.”

But serious questions remain. This is Jones’s third group of coaches since he started. He needs to build continuity, but will they all actually last to the World Cup or will there be more casualties along the way? The one constant is that while their jobs are always on the line, Jones’s is not.