The first time we’ve seen this clip.
In the week building up to Ireland’s trip to Twickenham, footage has emerged showing Eddie Jones talking about ‘the scummy Irish.’
The footage in question dates back to July last year, when Jones was a speaker at the FUSO Talks, a kind of TED talks style lecture on leadership, innovation and all those buzzwords you hear bandied about at these types of things.
Jones was talking about working together as a team when he couldn’t help but have a pop at Ireland.
“That’s the nice part of leadership, you’re job is to get the most out of each person and to do that, you want them to work together and be a regulated self-driven thing. We’re trying to do that with England at the moment, so we’ve played 23 Tests and we’ve only lost one Test to the scummy Irish, I’m still dirty about that game, but we’ll get that back, don’t worry, we’ve got them next year at home so don’t worry we’ll get that back.”
Jones, grinning broadly, was clearly pleased with himself but, judging by the muted response from the crowd, the ‘scummy’ dig went down like a lead balloon.
He was, of course, referring to Ireland’s 13-9 victory in Dublin last year that denied England back-to-back Grand Slams. Following that result, Jones admitted that England weren’t good enough on the day as Iain Henderson’s try proved crucial in stopping Jones’ men from capturing a record 19th consecutive Test victory. However, despite admitting that his men were outplayed, he clearly harboured some ill-will towards Joe Schmidt’s men.
We have the Second Captains to thank for the clip, with one of their listeners sending in the footage. Here is the video of the FUSO Talk below. Jones’ remark is around the 17:30 mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-btm103ZXN4
