FLICKING THE SWITCH
THERE CAN be liberation in accepting that change is needed. In an age when it feels like the mere concepts of compromise, concession and even accepting help can be lost amongst the angry voices, we may not notice how those who embrace them have grown. At first.
For example, it was the fear of an outsider, not an established name who had earned 36 Test caps, when Anthony Watson panicked about being asked to leave England’s pre-World Cup camp in 2019. He had only just come back from a 17-month ordeal where he had injured, and then shockingly reinjured, his Achilles. Then this. And although Eddie Jones reassured him time and again that his excursion wasn’t a sign that the coach was ready to cut the cord, we all know it’s the guys on the fringe that get sent away…
To make things that little bit – weirder is probably the right word? – Watson was not going back to his club in Bath but heading to Loughborough to train with the well-known sprint coach Jonas Dodoo. As Watson tells Rugby World of his mindset at the time, “I was absolutely bricking it!”
Watson would of course go to Japan and feature in six matches as England hammered towards a World Cup final, starting five of them. Today he hails Jones’s plan to send him away for individual training as a masterstroke. However, he may be skimming over how important it was
