Here is a thought. In another world, in slightly different circumstances, England might not have been led for most of this year by Eddie Jones. They could instead have been coached by the three assistant coaches of the Stuart Lancaster era: Andy Farrell, Graham Rowntree and Mike Catt.
You will remember that 13 months ago, when the RFU signed Jones to be the England head coach, he was already under contract and working for the Stormers, the Super Rugby franchise, in Cape Town. He had only just started working for them and the Super Rugby season was but a few weeks away.
So what would have happened if Jones had said: “I’d love to coach England, but I can’t walk out on the Stormers. Can I start next summer after the Super Rugby season?”
Here is your answer: the RFU would still have signed Jones. And Farrell, Rowntree and Catt would have run the ship on an interim basis. That is according to Ian Ritchie, the RFU chief executive who did the deal.
He and I are talking about Eddie-hunting. The signing of Jones was a massive decision for England but a huge one for Ritchie too, who had shared some of the blame for England’s World Cup malfunction. “You had to get it right,” he recalls. At this point, it is fair to say that he did.
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Ritchie recalls arriving in Cape Town on the morning of November 14 last year and scuttling through the airport for fear of being spotted and having his mission exposed: “I hardly fall into celebrity status, but I was thinking, ‘I hope nobody sees me getting off this plane.’ Because it would have been fairly clear what I was doing.”
He had a meeting room booked at the Table Bay Hotel on the Cape Town waterfront. He also recalls his first impressions on arriving there, and a sort of sinking feeling when he took in the view.
“The pressures certainly for England in a World Cup are such that you need a large volume of experience to cope with it
Earlier in the week, Jones had played down the suggestion that he might leave Cape Town for London. “I wake up in the morning,” he had said in the South African press, “I look out on to Table Mountain and think of how lucky I am to be here.” When Ritchie walked into the meeting room, there was Table Mountain right in front of him.
“I always remember going into the room,” Ritchie says. “Gloriously bright day, big window and Table Mountain, and I said, ‘Eddie, I hope this isn’t an uphill struggle.’ ”
To his relief, it was not. And the deal he did that day transformed England rugby.
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And yet the Jones deal has long seemed one of those Sliding Doors moments. What if England had beaten Wales in that infamous Twickenham pool game and reached the quarter-final? Would Ritchie still have given Lancaster the bullet? (He does not answer this, and, for a reasonably guarded man, that is no surprise.)
What if Japan, coached by Jones in that World Cup, had not beaten South Africa, thus heaping upon Jones all the acclaim? Would Jones still have been the go-to man? (Ritchie insists that he would.)
Ritchie, though, made what appeared to be an educated punt and jumped on the right carriage. And England have not lost a game since.
How and why did he decide to book that flight to Cape Town? “I must have had 30 to 40 one-on-ones with people,” he explains. These were the questions he was asking, he says: “What do we need to change? What do we need to do differently? What do you think we can do better? What didn’t work as well as it should during the World Cup? And therefore, what in terms of principle do we need to have in place to make sure that it improves?
“It wasn’t as if I was trying to persuade someone who was rampantly unwilling to do it
“It goes back to the fundamental point: have you been there, done it, got the experience?” Ritchie says. “The pressures, certainly for England in a World Cup, are such that you need a large volume of experience to cope with it.”
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“Certainty” is what he wanted in his new man. “Go back to the World Cup: was there enough certainty?” he asks. “Eddie walks in in January under a chunk of pressure for the Six Nations — and he is able to deal with that.”
The potential problems that Ritchie pondered on that flight to Cape Town never actually arose. Jones had made two suggestions in public that contravened England/RFU policy: 1. He suggested that they needed to contract their players centrally; 2. He suggested that they should pick players who were playing abroad.
“The two of us sat in that hotel room for four hours just talking through everything,” Ritchie says. “People say the first few minutes of any discussion, you get an idea of whether you can work with someone or not — and the next few hours confirmed that [I could].
“It was clear he was interested in the job. It wasn’t as if I was trying to persuade someone who was rampantly unwilling to do it.”
What struck Ritchie in particular was when they talked about the England team and the “clarity” of Jones’s opinion. “We talked about what they’d done, what he thought he could improve, what he could bring to the job,” Ritchie says.
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And Jones was happy to accept those potential issues — central contracts, overseas players. “He entirely got the bigger picture,” he says.
Ritchie concluded his meeting with Jones and then had lunch with Jones’s agent, Craig Livingstone. He knew that he wanted to bring Jones to England but had yet to secure his immediate release from the Stormers.
“It was very clear: Eddie is no shrinking violet and nor was he ever going to be
He says: “If it had been absolutely impossible and we couldn’t have done it, we would still have gone for the longer-term option and had some sort of holding operation.” That was the Farrell-Rowntree-Catt option. “That was always a possibility. That’s what we would have done.”
Again, these are “possibilities” that would have changed the landscape: Farrell might not now be with Ireland, likewise Catt with Italy or Rowntree with Harlequins.
All this, though, is merely hypothetical. Ritchie only dealt with the Stormers that day by phone. By the time that he boarded for his return to London that night, he had had verbal agreement that Jones would be released immediately. Eddie-hunting had been quick, extraordinarily painless and successful.
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I ask Ritchie if, when he did the deal, he took something of a deep breath. He must have known he was not signing up to an easy ride. Jones’s controversial decision to appoint Dylan Hartley as captain was confirmation of that.
“That is part of the deal,” Ritchie says. “It was very clear: Eddie is no shrinking violet and nor was he ever going to be. But you don’t want to have that. You want talented, committed people who have views of their own.”
What Ritchie saw, that he thought he liked, was that “certain amount of arrogance”, as he put it, “about how you think you can deal with things and move it forward.”
And that is what Ritchie has got: confidence, a certain amount of arrogance and absolute certainty.
