Cole recalls: “We played Scotland or something like that, and I remember going into a media briefing, and it was like: ‘You’re not allowed to talk about last week’s game against Scotland, and you’re not allowed to talk about next week’s game either.’ And it was like: ‘Well, what the fuck are we going to talk about then?’” Fortunately for everyone, it was when Eddie Jones was coach, so the answer was: ‘We don’t really need to talk about anything, because Eddie has made it all about himself.’”.
“All we set out to do was be good company in a car or a train,” Youngs says, “but equally I think rugby can be pretty complicated at times, and one of our main aims is to try and put it in layman’s terms.” He’s right that professional rugby’s intricate array of pods, patterns and shapes can be hard to understand from the stands.
It’s easy to just dismiss it all as boring but that’s only going to make people say: ‘Why would I watch that?’ I think one of the things rugby needs to get better at is opening the game up and explaining why things happen when they do.”.
It’s not just that they have a new captain or a couple of uncapped players, it’s that you have to go way back to 2009 to find the last time that one, the other, or, more often than not, both of Ben Youngs and Dan Cole weren’t with the squad.
“Yeah, stuff like that, you probably wouldn’t say it ahead of the game,” Cole agrees, “because during the week it will get blown out of proportion, and as soon as your head starts disappearing up your arse in the first scrum, it’ll be the end of you.”.
