England coach Eddie Jones has claimed he can complete the process that has taken New Zealand’s All Blacks to successive World Cup wins in half the time by leading England to victory in Japan later this year.
The Australian took charge of the England team after their shock exit in the pool stages when hosting the tournament in 2015 and will depart after this year’s tournament and he admitted after they failed to turn a 31 point lead over Scotland into a win on Saturday that they have problems that are comparable with those that saw the All Blacks spend close to a quarter of a century as the world’s top ranked side without winning the World Cup.
“I remember coaching against the All Blacks,” he said of his time as Australia head coach.
“We managed to win 45 per cent of Tests against the All Blacks and they were all in the final 20 minutes of the game and you could get them if you put enough pressure on them. It took them eight years to learn how to get out of it.
“Now we don’t have eight years, we’ve had four years and we’re still learning now and we’ve got to do it in half the time it took the All Blacks to learn it. So this is not a new problem that we’ve got, this is consistent in teams and it takes time to fix. You just don’t go like that clicks fingers and fix it. Do you know how many World Cups it took the All Blacks to fix it? So get some perspective about what we’re talking about here.”
He insisted that his team has everything it needs to win the World Cup next year if it can get its mentality right over the next six months, but said they have to learn to cope better with stress.
“I’ll tell you what it’s like, it’s like we have some hand grenades in the back of a jeep and sometimes they go off when there’s a lot of pressure,” said Jones.
“We have a few of them and we’ve got to get rid of them. It’s the way you think under pressure. The team has probably had it since the 2015 World Cup and we’ve been working on a process to fix it and we will get it right, but it takes time.
“Whenever you have a difficult tournament or difficult games, there’s always a lingering thought process there. Sometimes it takes longer than you’d like to fix it, but it is fixable.”
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