Eddie Jones learning from Mikel Arteta’s early-season success with Arsenal

Jones, 62, and Arteta, 40, are part of a group of coaches who share their various problems and help to find solutions. “It’s like Alcoholics Anonymous,” the England head coach said, before promptly confirming who else was in it with him.

Arteta had already outed himself, crediting Jones with helping him to trigger Arsenal’s impressive start to the season at the Emirates Stadium. They have been rejuvenated under the Spaniard and sit top of the Premier League, four points clear of Manchester City.

“You want to be judged on your decision-making, on how you would act differently in past scenarios. That’s been incredibly valuable for me,” Arteta said. “They can get strong insights into the situation because they have lived those situations in a very similar way.”

“One of the names can be Eddie Jones, who I’m building a very good relationship with. And it’s been really helpful and it’s someone that I admire so much.”

The feeling, Jones said, was mutual. “[Arteta] is a brilliant young guy. He understands how young players communicate. I have learnt about a fast start, how fast they get out of the blocks. Every game they are at it. They play with energy, they know how they want to play, they put the opposition on the back foot,” Jones said.

“In rugby – and we’ve been good at it at times and not so good at other times – 75 per cent of Test matches are won by the team who score the first try.”

Jones said the pair were joined by Matt LaFleur, the Green Bay Packers head coach, whose team lost to the New York Jets on Sunday, and two NBA coaches, George Karl and Mike Dunlap. “We’ve got all these guys in the same room. It’ll be fantastic when we all get together over a beer. We just share stories and each other’s problems and try to come up with ideas of how we can take coaching forward.”

Jones is voracious in his appetite to evolve as a coach and for his staff to develop at the same speed, hence his decision yesterday (Monday) to add Danny Kerry, the former Great Britain hockey coach and performance director, to his England management team.

Kerry masterminded Team GB’s gold-medal triumph in the women’s tournament at the 2016 Olympics and was one of the first consultants that Jones brought into the England environment.

“He has experience in big tournaments and he is a student of coaching. We need to be the best coaching team in the world,” Jones said. “If you look at any game of rugby at the moment you can control maybe 75 per cent of it. Then you have this other 25 per cent that you can’t control, that no one can control, whether it be referee intervention, whether it be TMO, HIA, all those sorts of things.

“To coach a team to be really sure about how they want to play and then accept the game will be different, we need our coaching to be of the highest quality. Danny is going to add to that. He is one of those guys who loves coaching. It is going to be a huge bonus for us.”

The triumphant GB women’s hockey teams all agreed they would not have won without Kerry. One of his innovations was to create “Thinking Thursday”. He would email the players on a Wednesday night and split them into three teams for a mini-tournament the next day in which there would be a tactical nuance. That could be scoring only from one side of the pitch, defending a 2-0 lead or having to find a way back into a game. Kerry left the players to figure this all out for themselves.

His mission was to cut out overreliance on coaching, which has been Jones’s mission since the summer tour to Australia. It ties in with his thinking about players being able to adapt to those events in a game that can derail a team, such as losing Kyle Sinckler to a head injury in the opening minutes of the 2019 World Cup final.

Most of the volatility occurs, Jones said, because of refereeing – or more specifically because he thinks the game is being run by television match officials. It is why Courtney Lawes is set to be retained as captain – he can strike a more measured tone with match officials than Owen Farrell.

“If we don’t have an Owen, we lose a huge percentage of our fight,” Jones said. “He is the most energetic and one of the most committed rugby players I’ve ever seen. We need that. But we also need someone who is also composed and speaks to the referee well.

“The referees are under so much pressure now. They’ve got a failed referee in the grandstand – that’s the TMO. It’s true though, isn’t it? They are usually blokes that have not been able to cut the mustard and they are telling the one on the field what to do.

“So [the key for a captain] is your ability to have a good conversation and find out how you can help the referee have a good game. Because if the referee has a good game, generally it is a good game. That’s important and we can’t have players yelling and screaming at the referee.”

– The Times

Originally published as Eddie Jones learning from Mikel Arteta’s early-season success with Arsenal