Jones ready to make England pay for gamble

It is all happening down there in the southern hemisphere. Harry Viljoen, the relatively new Springbok coach, harbours wild fantasies about a South African team negotiating an entire 80-minute Test without kicking the ball, while John Mitchell, the very new All Black coach, has effectively promised to restore some old-fashioned knuckle to a silver fern game gone soft. And then there is Eddie Jones, the smartest cookie on the biscuit shelf. We are going to have some fun with "Fast Eddie" over the next few years.

Four months, five Tests and two very large trophies into his career as the Wallabies' top dog – he succeeded Rod Macqueen following the world champions' decisive victory over the British Isles in Sydney last July, and won both the Tri-Nations championship and the Bledisloe Cup at his first attempts – Jones has spent a hugely entertaining week rattling Clive Woodward's cage during the build-up to tomorrow's England-Australia shindig at Twickenham. This is entirely in character. During the summer, he repeatedly rang Graham Henry's bell with his clever little darts at the Lions.

Before the tourists played his own Australia A side in Gosford, Jones let it be known that he was "disappointed at the amount of foul play" in the Lions' previous fixture against Queensland. "It quickly became a big theme of the tour," Henry wrote in his account of the trip. "Wherever the cadre of Australian coaches thought we might be a threat, they started a propaganda war in that area through the media. I understood the intent behind Jones' comments; I was worried they might have the effect of concentrating referees' attention too single-mindedly on the Lions, so they would be only refereeing one side for much of the time." The result of the game? A three-point victory for the Jones boys.

When Henry describes his rival as a "totem figure" in Australian rugby, he is bang on the money. A 41-year-old Sydney-sider who hooked for Randwick and New South Wales, Jones is a proven winner with clear ideas on how the game should be played: pragmatically, but with a clear emphasis on attack. He is not outspoken in any obvious sense, but he is not above dropping the odd pebble in the pond by stealth. When Woodward reacted publicly to his opposite number's suggestion that England's fast-tracking of the rugby league recruit Henry Paul might conceivably be seen as a cheapening of international honours, Jones wore the satisfied smile of a man who had struck a minor, but worthwhile, psychological blow.

He was at it again yesterday. To begin with, there was a little dig at Jason Robinson, Woodward's high-risk choice at full-back. "He's sharp, Robinson," Jones acknowledged. "But playing full-back at Test level is different to playing full-back in club rugby. It's a specialist role, and I see this as a very adventurous selection by Clive. I tried the same thing at the ACT Brumbies with Andrew Walker, who had just come across from league, and he found the positional aspect very difficult. On the wing, a player gets a free rein. There is no free rein at full-back."

By way of a follow-up, Jones delivered a loaded comment on England's approach to tomorrow's game. "They have placed an enormous amount of importance on this match," he said. "They have created this image of themselves as an attacking side, and have put all their eggs in the one basket. Of course, the game is important to us, too, but more in the sense of it being our next game. We are at the start of a challenging series of Tests and my aim over the next three weeks is to be able to say that this Wallaby side is better than the one that started the international season back in June."

Very loaded, very clever. Yet Jones does not spend every waking minute working out smart-arsed ways of winding up the opposition. Charged with the task of retaining the Webb Ellis Trophy when his nation hosts the fifth World Cup in 2003, he plans to spend the next year and a half reinventing the Wallabies' attacking game while retaining the defensive strategy that allowed them to win the 1999 tournament at the cost of a single try. Does he agree, then, that this green-and-gold vintage, armed as it is with wondrously gifted backs, has under-performed on the scoreboard?

"I think it would be unfair to accuse recent Wallaby teams of playing with any lack of dynamism," he replied. "I go back to the word 'pragmatic'. In 1998 and '99, top-class rugby was dominated by defence, to the extent that the Canterbury Crusaders won successive Super 12 titles on tackling alone. In 2000, we saw a new interpretation of the tackle law, and that gave us a Tri-Nations tournament that included some of the greatest attacking rugby anyone had ever seen. A year on, there was a relaxation of that law, so we were back in a situation where defending sides had the advantage. The situation at the moment is that it is still difficult to attack with certainty. You can do everything right in attack and still lose the ball.

"So I'm going to have to make my improvements in stages. You may not see too many changes on the Test paddock for another 18 months or so, but the work we're doing in training now will eventually emerge in our match-day performance. I have a lot of ideas about how we can take our game to another level, about how we can play better for longer, but these things don't get done overnight. There are skill issues involved here, and psychological issues too."

Cue another mild poke at Woodward and his red rose lieutenants. "England have tried hard to break away from their old conservatism, and some of the rugby they played last spring was outstanding," continued Jones. "But I don't think it's practical to go from one extreme to the other without anything in between. Have they tried to do this too quickly?" He left the question hanging in the air, secure in the knowledge that it did not require an answer.