Eddie Jones backed by RFU despite 'extremely disappointing' Six Nations failure as official review begins

The Rugby Football Union has vowed to stick by England head coach Eddie Jones despite the “extremely disappointing” Six Nations campaign as the review into their fifth-place finish began at Twickenham on Wednesday.

RFU chief executive Steve Brown admitted that the three consecutive defeats that England suffered were “not what we wanted and not what we expected”, but cautioned against any knee-jerk reaction to dismiss the Australian despite England’s worst championship showing in 31 years given that the focus remains on the 2019 Rugby World Cup.

As Brown addressed the media on Tuesday morning, Jones was tucked away in the confines of Twickenham with his entire coaching team and support staff dissecting what went wrong in their unsuccessful title defence, with the head coach due to face the Professional Game Board before meeting with the RFU Board next Wednesday.

But regardless of the outcome from those reviews, Jones will lead England to South Africa this summer.

“The results in the Six Nations were not what we wanted, not what we expected and there is no attempt by us to dress this up,” said chief executive Brown. “Everyone is deeply disappointed, we will learn from this and make sure it doesn’t happen again. The key is, what do we do next?

“Clearly there are learnings and that's the case whatever the outcome, but none more so than now when you come fifth. We have to learn and have to improve. That's the thinking that the coaching team of England.

“It's worth reflecting but Eddie has an 86 per cent win record with England. You don't become a bad coach or team overnight. We were motoring pretty well and things were going particularly well. We have hit a bit of a bump and now is the time to regroup and reassess and get back on track.

“Eddie and his coaches have my confidence and the measure of how good they and can be will be how they respond to these tough times. No one is patting each other on the back, they're looking for solutions to put us back to where we were before.

"Maybe we were not quite as good as our results were showing before [the Six Nations] but we are not as bad as fifth in the Six Nations. That's an important point. We're hugely disappointed but confident in the ability to turn this around. These are the moments when you don’t knee jerk without the evidence and data. We are not knee-jerking but we are going to learn. We go again and we will bounce back.”

Sir Clive Woodward, the former England head coach, accused England of “stagnating” over the last 18 months in the wake of the 24-15 defeat by Ireland at the weekend, with the Rugby World Cup winner expressing his concern with both the team under Jones and the fitness of his players.

But Brown rejected those claims, and echoed Jones’ belief that the defeats this year could prove beneficial for his grand plan to win the 2019 Rugby World Cup in Japan as long as the right lessons are learned from the trio of losses against Scotland, France and Ireland.

“No I don’t think that’s true,” he said. “I think inevitably there’s some cycles that we’ll go through over time. The key thing for us – and we’ve said it all along and I know it’s tough when you’ve just had the results we’ve had – is we’re focused on 2019, that’s the key aspect of the plan here, and I know Eddie absolutely is focused on 2019.

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“We have to get everything in place that puts us in the strongest possible position to be able to win and be capable of winning that World Cup, and one could argue that a few losses along the way are going to really test that and make sure you are in the best place possible.”

The performance this year has also raised questions about Brown’s decision to award Jones a two-year contract extension in January that runs until the end of the 2020/21 season. The move, brown stressed, was based on Jones’ performance up until that point and was two-fold on keeping the Australian tied down to the RFU along with ending questions about who will take over when he eventually leaves – although those questions are almost certain to return immediately after Japan 2019 regardless of England’s performance.

Asked if the decision was taken too early, Brown responded: “Not at all, no, and let’s just be clear on that. We spoke before and as you’ll recall the whole point of that is the two things we want to achieve. One of them was to secure Eddie post-World Cup based on success, so there’s a performance element in that. If Eddie is not successful, and we’re not successful, there is no contract after that, so that is clear-cut.

“The second bit, which you may argue the opposite at the moment, was to take the distraction away. We didn’t want the distraction and the debate and the deliberations and whatever else might have been on Eddie’s future and our future, in the build-up to the World Cup. They were the two primary reasons for doing that and absolutely it was the right thing to do and we stick by it.”