England’s Eddie Jones looks doomed in rugby’s coaching soap opera | England

There are long-established soap operas with fewer plot strands than international rugby coaching right now. Not since EastEnders’ Dirty Den returned to Walford in 2003 has there been a prime-time comeback to match Warren Gatland’s return as head coach of Wales. And then we have the disintegrating marriage between Eddie Jones and the Rugby Football Union, the most hotly debated Australian relationship in these parts since Kylie first clapped eyes on Jason.

How ironic, too, that on the very same day the RFU’s anonymous panel of experts met to discuss whether to remain just good friends with their old mate Eddie, the Welsh Rugby Union opted to go back to the future by rehiring their old southern hemisphere guv’nor for one last job. Can you revolutionise a national team’s prospects so close to a World Cup? One way or another, we are about to find out.

The swooping return of the “Gatman” in place of the jettisoned Wayne Pivac also heaped further pressure on Twickenham’s guardians. One of the more enticing scenarios doing the rounds – and there have been some wacky ones – was the idea of Gatland assisting England in a temporary “godfather” role, with Steve Borthwick riding shotgun before assuming the top job after the next World Cup. Now that cunning wheeze is just another screwed-up sheet of paper among many littering the office floor of Bill Sweeney, the RFU’s chief executive.

There is also the small matter of the decisiveness with which Wales have reacted to their disappointing calendar year. The cash-strapped union will have had to dig deep to pay off Pivac and reactivate Gatland but once it was decided that was the way to go the deed has been swiftly done. Back in Twickenham, from an external perspective, there has been more than a hint of paralysis by analysis, both on and off the field.

One also wonders if anyone in the RFU had time to cast their eyes up to the television screens to study the final day of the Rawalpindi Test. If so they would have seen precisely what is suddenly possible when a team, to borrow from Psalm 121, is encouraged to lift up its eyes unto the hills. It was not just that England’s cricketers won an exciting Test against the odds. It was the history-making fashion in which they did it and their readiness to risk everything to make it happen.

Think back to the same players’ drooping body language before Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes took over. Now rewind to Twickenham during and immediately after last month’s South Africa defeat and ask yourself whether a touch of “Bazball” might be just what the English rugby doctor ordered. Different sports, of course, but a positive attitude can make a massive difference.

The mind also spools back to the day in Brisbane in July when we asked Jones what he thought about the…