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This was published 4 months ago
‘We’ve got no hardness about us’: Jones’ Wallabies verdict revealed in new doco
By Iain Payten
With whispered tones and a long-lens shot, it presents as a fantastic, behind-the-curtain documentary scene.
The setting is a glum Wallabies training session at the Rugby World Cup the day after the side crashed to a record loss to Wales in Lyon, and effectively crashed out of the tournament.
Talking quietly, coach Eddie Jones stands with veteran prop James Slipper and gives his take on a root problem in Australian rugby.
“That’s the problem, mate, we’ve got no hardness about us. Game hardness is different to any sort of hardness, when you just stick in the f---ing game and do it. There’s none of that in Australian rugby now, and that’s where the big gap is, mate,” Jones says.
“We’re not not tough, but we’re not trained to be tough now, and we’re not used to playing tough. Like, it’s an exception to play tough now rather than the norm. It stands out like dogs’ balls, mate... it’s set up for failure, mate. They are good players and they care, they are just not hardened to play Test match rugby consistently.”
The exchange was captured because there were two cameras trained on a mic’d up Jones at the time, as there had been for most of the year. The end result is the new three-episode Stan documentary series which was released this week, The Wallabies: Inside Rugby World Cup 2023.
Eddie Jones being interviewed for the Stan documentary.
For many Wallabies fans, the idea of re-living the disastrous 2023 season, culminating in an extra-disastrous Rugby World Cup campaign, might be as appealing as forced fingernail removal.
But for general sports fans, and even those battered Wallabies loyalists, the chance to get a rare insight into the unseen world of the Wallabies – from the daily minutiae through to the squad’s obvious care in the gold jersey – makes a viewing worthwhile. Cathartic, even.
Those tuning in to find salacious detail about the many stops of the Eddie Jones circus (Japan, Cooper/Hooper, airport meltdowns) won’t find much to gorge on. Each moment is covered but not dwelt on, instead folded through the overarching narrative of the Wallabies’ broader journey as a team.
“We’re not doing a Four Corners episode on the Eddie Jones saga,” Matt Campbell, executive producer and group chief executive of CJZ, told colleague Tom Decent.
Defeat to Wales all but sealed the fate of Samu Kerevi and the Wallabies in France.Credit: Getty
From the outset, it would have been easy for Australian television production company CJZ and Karlinberg Entertainment to turn the cameras all on Jones, a far more compelling central character than Dave Rennie, who was still coach when the project was green-lit at the end of 2022.
But the ambition of the filmmakers was to humanise the Wallabies players and coaches, as they experience the highs and lows of one of the biggest years in a player’s career.
And on that front, it delivers in spades. From a year that contained a truckload of chaos and uncertainty, the Wallabies players come out with reputations enhanced.
In the model of the popular Ashes documentaries, an initial batch of seven players was selected to be feature characters; some rising rookies, some stars and some veterans. Some, like Michael Hooper and Allan Alaalatoa, didn’t even get to the tournament, and others who were elevated to prominent roles, like captain Will Skelton, weren’t added.
James Slipper is a prominent character in the Wallabies documentary.Credit: Stan Sport
So in the end, as the going gets tough, most of the interviews are with veterans Slipper and Nic White. And the straight-talking pair end up being good proxies for a squad who start the year with optimism (White learning of his selection outside the Prime Minister’s office is excellent) but end it with a haunted look of pain and dejection. Taniela Tupou’s anguish as he battles injury also shows how much emotional turmoil players experience.
As team doctor Sharron Flahive says in one interview, most of us go through life with ripple-sized highs and lows. Professional athletes get it on a rollercoaster scale.
But where Wallabies players open up and bare their souls, the representation of Jones paints a different picture. Or, to be more accurate, the same old picture.
The hope with a fly-on-the-wall documentary about a Jones Wallaby team – which saw crew embedded with the side all year and yielded hundreds of hours of footage – was that it would finally give us insight into one of the most fascinating characters in Australian sport.
And there is a little, with Jones gradually opening closed doors as the year went on, and allowing cameras in his talks to the team in meetings and after games. But much of it still comes across as guarded and performative.
Most insiders will tell you the Jones persona that fronts media conferences and talks publicly is different to the one who sits in a coaches meeting, challenging his staff with blunt and abrasive language. One of Jones’ staff, attack coach Brad Davis, quit just before the Rugby World Cup.
But the coach that comes across in the documentary is almost always the “public Eddie”.
The closest we get to a glimpse of Jones the gruff coach is a grab of him challenging psychologist Corinne Reid at a meeting in France, when she is relaying the process of players getting information about Skelton’s new injury before the Wales game. Jones had laid out his intention to fudge the severity of the injury to the media.
“What information do the players need?” he asks. “I am not going to tell them [who is playing] because I don’t want it out in the media.”
As he’d done throughout the year, Jones apologises after the Wales loss for taking the gamble of cutting experienced players and taking the youngest ever squad to a Rugby World Cup.
But in his last fortnight on the grass with the Wallabies, then sidles up to Slipper – one of the surviving old crew - to quietly bemoan a lack of Test-match hardness of those players.
Wearing a microphone that had just been clipped to his shirt.
All three episodes of the brand new Stan Original Documentary Series The Wallabies - Inside Rugby World Cup 2023 are available on Stan.