Eddie Jones is one of my favourite coaches, and much of what he has theorised has helped me expand my thinking about this game. When I think about ‘roles’ in phase play and how they can influence and illustrate a team’s style of play, I think about Eddie Jones and his talk about “hybrid players”, like Jack Nowell essentially playing like a flanker for England.

That statement caused a lot of raised eyebrows at the time but it was a perfect distillation of what the modern player is expected to produce. If you take out pushing in the scrum or, perhaps, acting as a receiver in the lineout, what is the difference in open play between a player like Jack Nowell was at his peak and, say, John Hodnett? Both are expected to make runs on the edge of the play, they’re both expected to win wide rucks and be able to finish a try in the wide channels or give the pass before the finish. Both a winger like Nowell at his peak and a flanker like Hodnett will have very similar attacking metrics in the aftermath of a game where both play well.

So understanding that part of Eddie’s thought process was really revealing for me. Basically, when Eddie Jones says something about the game, I take it seriously.

This is why a quote of his from the last few weeks really stuck with me.

“So we’ve got to be junkies for winning, not junkies for possession. Possession rugby is dead. It’s dead for the moment and it’s probably going to be dead for a long period of time.” 

Possession rugby is dead?

It’s a big statement – very Eddie Jones – but is he correct?

I’m not sure. If we look at the rest of his quotes, we can get a deeper understanding of what he’s really talking about.

“You look to the playing population of Australian rugby now: 60 per cent is Pasifika, 40 per cent’s white so that means the 60 per cent of Pasifika, we’ve got to play power rugby. Like, we can’t play a long-phase, hold-the-ball (rugby) with different sorts of gene pools.

”We’ve got to play smart, we’ve got to play to what the laws are now and we’ve got to play to our strengths, which is about being smart, being really fast and aggressive on the first couple of phases and then be able to kick constructively to get the ball back.

“We don’t want to kick to them. We want to kick the ball back.”

Australia were a decent side under Rennie but didn’t look like a side capable of winning the World Cup as they were constructed in my opinion. Clearly, Rugby Australia agreed because you don’t bring Eddie Jones in on a four-year deal with a hefty $4.5m price tag without understanding the need for a change. So outside the weird gene pool stuff, a lot of what he’s saying here makes a tonne of sense. Eddie took over the Wallabies with exactly five games to play before the first game of the World Cup against Georgia.

That is not enough time to embed a deep game plan in a group of players who have no experience with Jones methods and limited time available for camps to bed those ideas in en-masse. What Eddie is talking about here is turning Australia into an incredibly powerful off-ball team with a heavy transition game and a massive set-piece strike arsenal.

In his last full season with England, Eddie had a different approach during the 2022 Six Nations because the players available to him were different.

The only team to kick fewer metres than England were Ireland but, crucially, England played far fewer balls on phase play which meant they had on-ball kicking tendencies but a very limited attacking game that saw them with a PPC ratio closer to France – one of the biggest off-ball teams in the world under Galthié.

Eddie was trying to turn England into a possession-based team but he didn’t have the firepower or the 80-minute creativity to make it work consistently. If you look at Eddie’s statement defeats in the last few years of his tenure, every single one of them saw his England side out carry the team who defeated them and kick fewer times in all games bar his last defeat to Scotland.

The tipping point, for me, was England’s loss at home to Argentina in November 2022. England owned the ball in that game, carrying 70 times more than Argentina with a 1.4 PPC ratio on 63% possession. Argentina, by contrast, played off-ball rugby where they outkicked England consistently (in volume and distance) and tackled England to a standstill.

Six years into Eddie’s tenure, with months upon months of camps and frameworking done and his England side never looked more blunt and ineffective when it came to breaking a team that they should, in my opinion, have beaten routinely.

Is this what turned Eddie Jones into an advocate for off-ball, high-kick volume rugby?

“There’ll be a hundred thousand people there, right, and we kick the ball 70 times and we beat New Zealand, everybody is going to be happy. We kick the ball 10 times and we get beaten 40-10, they’re going to walk out kicking stones.” 

With the physical size and power that Jones now has at his disposal – the 6’5″ 130kg tighthead prop Pone Fa’amausili was front and centre at a recent presser for a reason – he has the heft and power to successfully play off-ball, kick-pressure rugby with some of the best transition runners in the game in his outside backline.

It will take Jones no time at all to embed a heavy blitz defence with Brett Hodgson, a rugby league defence and kicking specialist,  as one of his first hires. Eddie Jones is going to go BIG with this Wallabies team and, to do it, he’s going to embed a tight, high-volume kicking game that will be cardio-friendly to that kind of size. A super-sized pack and midfield do not want to play multiple phases of possession – just as Toulouse – because attacking rugby is infinitely more physically taxing than defence.

If it works, possession rugby might be dead – dead at the hands of a gigantic Wallaby team that will have the heft to trouble absolutely anyone in this game.