Watch every second of the 2025 Autumn Nations Series live and on demand via Stan Sport.<\/a><\/p>\nThe move sparked anger in Australia, after Jones had repeatedly denied reports that he was set to take the Japan job.<\/p>\n
The 65-year-old has led teams against Australia in the past and enjoyed a successful head-to-head record during his time as England coach from 2015 to 2022.<\/p>\n
Jones named his team on Thursday for the game at Tokyo’s National Stadium and said he was looking forward to upsetting his countrymen again.<\/p>\n
“I enjoy beating Australia — I coached against them 10 times for England and beat them nine times,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Playing against you own country, there’s always a certain amount of different feeling involved in it, but it just brings out the extreme competitive spirit within yourself.”<\/p>\n
Australia play Japan before heading to Europe to take on England, Italy, Ireland and France on successive weekends.<\/p>\n
Coach Joe Schmidt named his team to face Japan earlier in the day, with 13 changes from the side that lost to New Zealand in the Rugby Championship.<\/p>\n
Jones said there was “a winning opportunity” for Japan if they can unsettle an unfamiliar Wallabies line-up.<\/p>\n
“When you’re playing a team that has got a lot of players that are playing for a spot and they want to be the starting guys, if things don’t go their way at the start of the game, they can get frustrated,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Our job is to bring out that frustration. Our job is to be at them the whole time.”<\/p>\n
Jones handed veteran flanker Michael Leitch his 90th cap in a line-up that mixes experience with youth.<\/p>\n
The coach said his team were planning to hit the Wallabies with “a Japanese style of rugby”.<\/p>\n
“We realise that it’s a big task for us but we feel like we’re up to it,” he said.<\/p>\n
“We’re ready to take them on.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Eddie Jones said facing his native Australia brings out his “extreme competitive spirit” as the Japan coach plots…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":143837,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,941,760,85],"class_list":["post-234757","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-japan","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234757","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234757"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234757\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/143837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234757"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234757"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234757"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}