Eddie Jones says the Wallabies need to move past their obsession with the glory days of possession-based rugby in order to become ‘junkies for winning’.
The Wallabies head coach gave the clearest indication that he will be adopting a win-at-all-costs mentality and move Australia on from throwing the ball around against the likes of Ireland, France, New Zealand and South Africa, who have all achieved success by using kicking and defence to pressure their opposition.
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Jones said the pressure will be on for the Wallabies to use a smarter strategy in the Bledisloe Cup game against the All Blacks at the MGC in July.
“There’ll be a hundred thousand people there, right, and we kick the ball 70 times and we beat New Zealand, everybody is going to be happy,” Jones told an Australian schoolboys function in Sydney on Friday.
“If we kick the ball 10 times and we get beaten 40-10, they’re going to walk out kicking stones.
“So we’ve got to be junkies for winning, not junkies for possession. Possession rugby is dead. It’s dead for the moment and it’s probably going to be dead for a long period of time.
“The game’s about being fast now. You’ve got 75% of tries being scored in three phases – 75%. So why would you keep the ball for 10 phases?
“That’s just stupid to even think like that anymore, and unfortunately there’s that thinking still in rugby.”
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Jones pointed to Australian rugby’s influx of Pacific Island players as further evidence that the Wallabies need a change of tactics.
“You look at the playing population of Australian rugby now: 60% is Pasifika, 40% is white. So that means the 60% of Pasifika, we’ve got to play power rugby. Like, we can’t play a long-phase, hold-the-ball [rugby] with different sorts of gene pools.
“We’ve got to play smart, we’ve got to play to what the laws are now and we’ve got to play to our strengths, which is about being smart, being really fast and aggressive on the first couple of phases and then be able to kick constructively to get the ball back.
“We don’t want to kick to them. We want to kick the ball back.
“You just have a look at the Australian backline that we could pick, we’ve probably got the most powerful backline in the world,” he added.
“So we’ve got to be able to use that. But we can’t use that by keeping the ball for 10 or 12 phases because they don’t have the petrol in the tank.
“You know when your car is going on empty, you’ve got to put some petrol in it. So we’ve got to put petrol in our players.”
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