Throughout his glittering career, Eddie Jones has suffered several setbacks but he has just one regret.
His Wallabies team was beaten by a clutch Jonny Wilkinson drop goal in the 2003 Rugby World Cup final in Australia and his England side fell to a defeat at the hands of the Springboks 16 years later.
After masterminding South Africa’s downfall in their opening game of the 2015 World Cup, his Japan outfit failed to reach the knockout stages of the competition.
Eddie Jones’ only regret
The list goes on and on as Jones has suffered and celebrated on both sides of professional sport’s brutality.
But the 66-year-old globetrotting veteran coach has just one regret from his coaching career and it’s not any of the above.
“The only regret I have is Australia in 2023,” Jones told the DSPN podcast with Martin Devlin, referencing his decision to take over the reins as the Wallabies head coach in the year of a World Cup after leaving England.
Jones came in to replace Dave Rennie at the helm of the Wallabies, a controversial decision from Rugby Australia, just months before the tournament in France.
It left the experienced coach with a short runway before the tournament and he was unable to really implement change quickly enough and it ended disastrously with Australia failing to progress past the pool stages of a World Cup for the first time, with Jones parting ways with the Wallabies after the tournament.
“I don’t regret doing the job, but if I had my time again… I basically signed to do 2027. I didn’t want to do 2023. Like, who takes over a World Cup team in the year of the World Cup?” Jones continued.
“Training-wise, we had four days of training in Australia before we got on a plane to fly to South Africa. So, we had no preparation time. You’re trying to create a new style of play because when a coach changes, you need to bring something new in, generally speaking. And I tried to do too much.
“I don’t regret having a go at it, but I regret that I should have probably been a bit more moderate in how I went about it.”
2019 defeat to the Springboks
Four years prior, Jones had led England’s inspired run to the 2019 Rugby World Cup final, stunning the defend champion All Blacks in the semi-finals.
However, his team came unstuck in the final against Rassie Erasmus’ Springboks, falling to a 32-12 defeat.
Reflecting on that defeat, Jones admits that he didn’t change his matchday 23 up enough in the build-up to the final.
“We chopped and changed the team throughout that tournament. Kept the team fresh all the time. Made one or two changes all the time,” he said.
“We had a reasonably good depth in the squad and just some subtle changes, sometimes starting with Joe Marler, sometimes starting with Mako [Vunipola], they were different sorts of players, we had a few players like that.
“The one thing I regret is that I didn’t change the team, I just needed to send the message that we still can get better, maybe. In those situations, the subtlety of your message can have such an effect on the team, and I don’t think the message I gave the team was good enough.
“We spoke about all the things we know that they are going to come hard; we know they’re going to be physical. This is what we have to do.
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“Sometimes, particularly when you’ve had a good win, you sit back a bit and you think ”Ah that’s good’ but the really good teams and those that become world champion, and New Zealand has been it for a long time, you’ve had that win and you’re back your sitting on your chair and you are ready to go again. Maybe I just didn’t get that message right at the start of the week.”