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'When I heard he was announced as England's coach, I thought that was me done in all honesty'

By PA
(Photo by David Rogers/Getty Images)

Chris Robshaw has pinpointed proving Eddie Jones wrong as among his career highlights, ahead of his 300th and final Harlequins appearance today.

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Wily sage Jones rated Robshaw a six-and-a-half in a withering newspaper column at the 2015 World Cup, only to extend the flanker’s Test career after succeeding Stuart Lancaster.

Robshaw has revealed the hurt of the “slow death” end of his captaincy after England became the worst-performing hosts in World Cup history in 2015.

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But the 34-year-old has also paid tribute to Australian taskmaster Jones, who might have removed him as captain – but also handed him a new lease of Test-match life.

Robshaw will leave his sole club Quins after Sunday’s Premiership trip to Leicester, and head to USA club San Diego Union.

The hard-grafting back-rower admitted he will move abroad being able to look back with pride on all things both club and country.

“I’m very proud of being able to win him over,” said Robshaw, of Jones.

“When I heard he was announced as England’s coach, I thought that was me done in all honesty, after those comments, and of course after the way the World Cup had gone.

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“I very much expected never to play for England again. I remember getting as many of my family and friends as possible to the Uruguay game, because I thought ‘this is it’. Even in the horrible situation it was in.

“But Eddie’s been nothing but honest. We had a good sit down and a chat behind closed doors, for about an hour-and-a-half, got know each other.

“The trust he’s shown in me, the second life he gave me in playing for my country again, and getting that Grand Slam in 2016. For me that was so big, and even now.

“The RFU gave us little Grand Slam trophies. That was incredible, and something you can always look back on in the time to come when you’re an old man and reliving the glory days.

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“I don’t have many things up in the house, at home I try to keep the rugby stuff a bit separate.

Chris Robshaw, Danny Care
Danny Care and Chris Robshaw – speaking to the ex-RFU chief Ian Ritchie in Argentina in 2017  (Photo by Dan Mullan/Getty Images,)

“But I’ve got that up upstairs, and I’ve got my 50th cap up on the mantle, the silver cap you get, which is just a nice thing to have to mark a lovely achievement.”

England swept into the 2015 World Cup on a wave of optimism, only to bomb out by failing to pass the group stages.

Stuart Lancaster and his coaching staff lost their jobs, and Robshaw, eventually, lost the captaincy, with Dylan Hartley taking over.

Now, though, Robshaw has admitted relinquishing the England captaincy lifted a great weight.

“Yes it was a relief, very much so, it was a pressured, very tough time,” said Robshaw.

Robshaw Jones
Eddie Jones saw something in Robshaw /Getty

“And I was feeling things, the weight on my shoulders. I felt it was something I couldn’t really escape at the time.

“It was a bit of a slow death, at the time I felt almost surrounded and suffocated by it.

“It was probably always going to happen, and when it finally did I felt ‘great, I can finally just focus on playing rugby now’.

“Eddie’s always been very good to me, he’s always been very honest, he’s never mucked me around, he’s always been pretty straight-talking and I respect him hugely for that.

“The first meeting we had in camp, he said ‘look there’s a position for you in my side at six, I want you to do X, Y and Z but for the captain I’m going to go in a different direction and I’m going to make Dylan captain’.

“I was very supportive of that, and I’m still very supportive of Dylan and the role he played, because he was fantastic.

“And I was so grateful just to have a second opportunity, a second lifeline just to play for my country again.”

Robshaw will become just the second player in Quins history to hit the 300 mark, after Mike Brown, and admitted he could think of few more fitting ways to seal his stint with the club.

Robshaw strange Harlequins Premiership restart
(Photo by Steve Bardens/Getty Images)

“It’s something I actually started thinking about earlier this season, seeing what games I was on and seeing what I might be able to play,” said Robshaw.

“I always knew it was going to be touch and go, but I didn’t realise it would be the last game ever for Harlequins.

“Probably when I first started it was nothing that I would ever have even dreamt about trying to achieve.

“But now I’ve got close it feels like an incredible milestone to go out and represent the club as many times as I have, through the good, the bad and the ugly, so to speak.

“And I think just to finish on that is just a nice thing to look back on.

“It might not mean much to other people, but to myself, it just makes me feel quite proud.”

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AllyOz 1 day ago
Does the next Wallabies coach have to be an Australian?

I will preface this comment by saying that I hope Joe Schmidt continues for as long as he can as I think he has done a tremendous job to date. He has, in some ways, made the job a little harder for himself by initially relying on domestic based players and never really going over the top with OS based players even when he relaxed his policy a little more. I really enjoy how the team are playing at the moment.


I think Les Kiss, because (1) he has a bit more international experience, (2) has previously coached with Schmidt and in the same setup as Schmidt, might provide the smoothest transition, though I am not sure that this necessarily needs to be the case.


I would say one thing though about OS versus local coaches. I have a preference for local coaches but not for the reason that people might suppose (certainly not for the reason OJohn will have opined - I haven't read all the way down but I think I can guess it).


Australia has produced coaches of international standing who have won World Cups and major trophies. Bob Dwyer, Rod Macqueen, Alan Jones, Michael Cheika and Eddie Jones. I would add John Connolly - though he never got the international success he was highly successful with Queensland against quality NZ opposition and I think you could argue, never really got the run at international level that others did (OJohn might agree with that bit). Some of those are controversial but they all achieved high level results. You can add to that a number of assistants who worked OS at a high level.


But what the lack of a clear Australian coach suggests to me is that we are no longer producing coaches of international quality through our systems. We have had some overseas based coaches in our system like Thorn and Wessels and Cron (though I would suggest Thorn was a unique case who played for Australia in one code and NZ in the other and saw himself as a both a NZer and a Queenslander having arrived here at around age 12). Cron was developed in the Australian system anyway, so I don't have a problem with where he was born.


But my point is that we used to have systems in Australia that produced world class coaches. The systems developed by Dick Marks, which adopted and adapted some of the best coaching training approaches at the time from around the world (Wales particularly) but focussed on training Australian coaches with the best available methods, in my mind (as someone who grew up and began coaching late in that era) was a key part of what produced the highly skilled players that we produced at the time and also that produced those world class coaches. I think it was slipping already by the time I did my Level II certificate in 2002 and I think Eddie Jones influence and the priorities of the executive, particularly John O'Neill, might have been the beginning of the end. But if we have good coaching development programmes at school and junior level that will feed through to representative level then we will have


I think this is the missing ingredient that both ourselves and, ironically, Wales (who gave us the bones of our coaching system that became world leading), is a poor coaching development system. Fix that and you start getting players developing basic skills better and earlier in their careers and this feeds through all the way through the system and it also means that, when coaching positions at all levels come up, there are people of quality to fill them, who feed through the system all the way to the top. We could be exporting more coaches to Japan and England and France and the UK and the USA, as we have done a bit in the past.


A lack of a third tier between SR and Club rugby might block this a little - but I am not sure that this alone is the reason - it does give people some opportunity though to be noticed and play a key role in developing that next generation of players coming through. And we have never been able to make the cost sustainable.


I don't think it matters that we have an OS coach as our head coach at the moment but I think it does tell us something about overall rugby ecosystem that, when a coaching appointment comes up, we don't have 3 or 4 high quality options ready to take over. The failure of our coaching development pathway is a key missing ingredient for me and one of the reasons our systems are failing.

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