Eddie Jones lets England players take training
Eddie Jones: Wants players to be 'participants not recipients'
Written by Simon Austin — June 6, 2017
ENGLAND rugby coach Eddie Jones is letting his squad take some of their own training sessions as he seeks to make them 'participants not recipients'.
In April, Jones bemoaned the fact his players could not think for themselves and ‘always want to be told what to do’. The Australian said his training sessions were about to become ’85% unstructured’ - and there have been big changes off the field too.
“Be a participant, don’t be a recipient,” Jones said. “Professional sport, to a large extent, is educating players to be a recipient and it’s our great belief that to be a World Cup-winning team you need to be a participant.
“I have still got a few years to go but we are moving in the right direction to making the head coach redundant, which is what we want.”
England are in Argentina preparing for their two-Test series against the Pumas, which begins on Saturday.
“We have got quite a unique demographic here so there are opportunities for people to jump from being a back-bencher to being Prime Minister,” Jones said.
“We very much want to have two levels of management, one is the staff, one is the players. We want the players to be responsible, self-driven, self-reliant.
“We just had a units meeting then and the players ran it. We set up as if the coaches were going to run it and then got the players to run it.
“They are the sort of things we are doing to constantly develop the leadership of the players, to develop their thinking about the game, develop more responsibility about being active.”
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