Doug Sanders never won a major golf tournament. He did, however, surrender the 1970 Open to Jack Nicklaus by missing a three-foot putt. ‘I rarely think about it,’ he revealed some years later. ‘A lot of days I can go a whole 10 minutes and it doesn’t enter my mind.’
It was the same for Eddie Jones, after Australia lost in 2003. In conversation with Sir Clive Woodward, his adversary in that World Cup final, he said he still thought about what he got right, and wrong, every day. And this was recently, within the time Jones has been England’s coach. Almost two decades later and the defeat still gnaws at him.
So he knows. He knows how it feels to get close to the prize and not be able to touch it. That was Sir Alex Ferguson’s message to his Manchester United players before the Champions League final in 1999. That at the end of the game, if they have lost, the trophy will be right there next to them, close enough to see their faces in it, and they will not be able to go anywhere near.
Eddie Jones understands the pain of World Cup final defeat after losing to England in 2003
Some of the 2003 demons were exorcised when Jones helped South Africa to the 2007 crown
To the watching world, finals are just another high stakes sports show. They will all be watching this weekend, as Jones acknowledged, but ultimately, win or lose, life will go on. The washing up will still need doing, the alarm clock will go off at 7am, as always, on Monday. Only one group of people will feel the intense loss.
Mauricio Pochettino blames his own strangeness this season, the fragility of his Tottenham players, on defeat in one match: the 2019 Champions League final, a game they were not even favoured to win.
And after the magnificent triumph over New Zealand in the semi-final, expectations around Jones’s England team have never been higher.
They have been the outstanding performers at this World Cup, they are supported on Saturday in a way they were not when going up against the All Blacks. This is now perceived as England’s final to lose. And that’s dangerous.
It must have felt a little like that in 2003. A team coached by Jones defeated New Zealand in the semi-final that year, too. And while England were the No 1 ranked team, they had not been playing well.
Australia went into a home final on a high, took Woodward’s England to extra-time, and then lost. The ebullient Jones looked quite sombre reflecting on it. There was clearly a toll, and a wound that was only healed when he became a belated part of South Africa’s successful backroom staff four years later.
‘I didn’t realise what an effect it had on me until possibly 2007,’ he said, suddenly serious. ‘You think everything is alright, but you lose a World Cup final and it’s a difficult experience.
‘I’ve known both emotions and I know the different feelings. If you don’t reflect really well on what has happened, which I didn’t after the 2003 World Cup, then you carry some things with you that aren’t always positive. They can be negative and they have an effect on how you approach your job.
Jones has been trying to keep things light in camp this week and not over-complicate things
‘I think I was just too desperate to win after that, and you can’t be desperate for things. You’ve got to have the will to prepare properly to win again, and it takes time to appreciate it. After you lose a World Cup you want it to happen again straight away, because you want to get rid of that memory and, of course, it isn’t like that. You’ve got to work again to build it up.
‘And sometimes you’re not as patient building it up. I think it happens with players as well. If you’ve experienced a significant trauma in your sporting career, it takes time to get over it.’
Significant trauma. Jones is instinctively driven more to mischief than drama, but there it was. Significant trauma is the potential downside of Saturday’s match.
He has prepared four years for this date, he talked about it with his players from their first meeting, embedded it in their minds: November 2, 2019, Yokohama, 6pm local.
Some specifics cannot have been part of the preparation — the identity of the opponents, for instance, because South Africa’s resurgence could most certainly not have been predicted — but Jones will say his entire time in charge has been geared towards peaking on this day.
To here, England have done just that. Nobody quite knew whether Jones had it right when this competition began, his team were even drawing negative reviews in the group stage, but if the aim of a manager at tournament time is for each game to have been better than the last, he has set England on a brilliant path.
Being Jones, he also had a pre-match message to reinforce: no fear. He used the pithy phrase at every opportunity, shoehorning it in no matter the question.
The Australian has taken every opportunity to tell his side to approach the final with ‘no fear’
Perhaps that was also behind his unusual decision to arrange a short coffee morning with the press and his entire squad on Thursday. Perhaps he had sensed a concern among the players around the consequences of failure. Perhaps he wanted to show that, when England are in the final, most of the media are supporters, too.
Gareth Southgate attempted a similar ploy before the 2018 World Cup in Russia. Tried to build bridges, tried to remove the tension in playing for England.
Southgate and Jones are close. Certainly, from experience, Jones will be seeking to remove all obstacles; and, ironically, at a time when one might imagine he would be most closely involved, his aim is to take a back seat.
‘I pretty much know what I’m going to say to the players,’ Jones revealed. ‘We’ll have a chat at the hotel before we leave but, look, all the work’s done, guys. I think I said when I first took over that my job is to become redundant. And I’m almost redundant now.
‘The team’s running the team, which is how it should be. We are playing much as I envisaged, as I visualised. I think you always work back from your target. What’s your goal? Where do you want to go? How are you going to get there?
‘I don’t have great visualisation powers. But I knew where we wanted to go and I know how we have to do it. So we just need to go ahead and get that done now.
It evolves. One of the best conversations I ever had was about two years ago with Louis van Gaal, the football manager. He explained it really simply. He said every coach has an idea of the way they want to play the game.
‘So I want to play the game one way (he mimes drawing a circle on the wall), then you get your squad, get the cultural context of your squad, and then you work out what shape you can play (he mimes drawing an imperfect circle this time).
‘I always had an idea of how I wanted to play, but it depends on what you have. I wanted to develop a power style of rugby as England have always got tough, big players. It suited us, but we will be tested on Saturday as we are playing the other most powerful team in the world.
‘I don’t think we talk about that English style enough. The players are proud of it and know it’s their style. It’s not someone else’s. They have evolved it, they have evolved the tactics, and they own the game. They’re really proud of how they play.
Jones always wanted England to play a physical brand and says the players are proud of it
‘Beyond that, it’s all about preparation. If you’re well prepared, you can play without fear, and that’s the other great thing for us.
‘Physically they’ve done their work. They know tactically how they want to play against South Africa. Emotionally they’re tight as a group. So that gives them the opportunity to go out and play their game.’
And then it was pushed just a little too far. It was mentioned to Jones that England’s progress had been smooth. And maybe that strayed towards the over-confidence that can lead to a dark night — a dark four years, and maybe more — of the soul.
‘I don’t think anything is smooth,’ he said. ‘You look at the journey of any team to the World Cup.
‘It’s difficult. Never smooth, always difficult. There’s ups and downs. You get injuries, illness, players lose form, you have players getting old quicker than you expected, you are continually trying to work out how to make the team better.
‘If you have a family of five, you have dinner, you have difficulties. We’ve got 31 players having dinner together, so every day is different, every day is about how you can make the dynamics better, how you can get them to think the same way. It’s coaching, mate. If it was that easy, everyone would do it.’
And everyone can’t. That’s why England needed the battle-scarred, the battle-hardened, the battle-ready, the not in the least redundant, Eddie Jones.
Saturday’s final will be the culmination of a long journey with plenty of ups and downs