SYDNEY (Reuters) – Newly-installed Wallabies coach Eddie Jones is looking to reverse the talent drain from Australian rugby union and bring back former schoolboy internationals who defected to rugby league.
Jones, who was sacked by England in December, replaced Dave Rennie as Wallabies coach on Monday in a shock move by Rugby Australia only eight months before the World Cup.
In his first stint as Australia coach from 2001 to 2005, Jones brought in backs Wendell Sailor, Lote Tuqiri and Mat Rogers from rugby league in a high profile recruitment drive.
Without disclosing any specific names, Jones said he would be looking to do something similar for the Wallabies this time around.
“There’s a definite priority in there, the first thing we want to do is retain all the talent in rugby then secondly we want to recruit back the guys who were in rugby and went to league,” he said in an interview with Channel 9 from London.
Rugby union has fallen on hard times in Australia in recent years, limiting its attraction to talented youngsters, but there is no shortage of players in Australia’s National Rugby League who played the game at schoolboy level.
One of the brightest young talents in the league, Joseph Sua’alii, played Rugby Sevens for Australia, for example, while his Sydney Roosters teammate Angus Crichton played for Australian schoolboys in 2013-14.
While such recruitment would probably have to be a long-term plan looking forward to the 2027 World Cup on home soil, Jones reiterated his belief that there was already enough talent in the Wallabies squad to win this year’s tournament in France.
Australia won the World Cup twice in the 1990s and reached the final under Jones in 2003, but bowed out in the quarter-finals at the 2019 edition and are currently ranked sixth in the world.
“First mission is to win the World Cup, that’s the first prize and we haven’t won that for a while,” Jones added.
“If you can’t improve a team in a week, you can’t coach, so I’ve got more than a week, I’ve got about 13 weeks.”
Jones expressed surprise at the lack of public interest in the Wallabies when he came home with England for a test series last July and said he wanted to take his squad around the country to build it back up.
“I can still remember getting sacked as the Australian coach and thinking at that stage ‘what else is there to do?’,” he said. “To try and play a small part in getting Australian rugby the front foot, back on a front page it’s just too much to resist.”
(Reporting by Nick Mulvenney, editing by Alex Richardson)
