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Exclusive: Eddie Jones was England's fallback option
By Jon Newcombe
Nick Mallett had not one but two sliding doors moments when it came to dealings with the RFU.
Highly respected as a player and as a coach, the Oxford-educated 68-year-old has revealed in the latest episode of RugbyPass TV’s Boks Office how close he was to becoming the head coach of the country of his birth.
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The RFU could have had the dream ticket of Mallett and Wayne Smith running the show at the home 2015 World Cup but chose Stuart Lancaster instead. And they could also have been spared the drama of the Eddie Jones regime had Mallett said yes to their offer second time around.
However, by then, the timing was all wrong and the chances of appointing Mallett, who led the Springboks on a record 17-match winning run in his three-year tenure as head coach between 1997-2000, had gone.
“At the end of 2011, I was approached and I was interviewed for it, and that’s when they gave it to Stuart Lancaster. I actually thought I was in with a shout. I had Wayne Smith who was going to coach with me and I thought that we would have had a good four years,” he told former Springboks Jean de Villiers and Schalk Burger.
“And then they asked when Lancaster didn’t get them out of their pool in 2015. My agent got a call to say they are offering you the job. They said, ‘you don’t have to interview for it, we feel we made a mistake last time’.
“But by that time I’d had four years at SuperSport. I phoned up Wayne Smith and said, ‘what’s your story?’ and he said, ‘I am tied in with New Zealand and I wouldn’t look at it again’.
“Your assistant coach is very important, the guy you work with is very, very important, so I turned it down and that’s when they gave it to Eddie.”
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Hereford-born Mallett ended up coaching Stade Francais in France before being appointed as head coach of Italy, a position which he held for four years, between 2007 and 2011.
Other than the Barbarians and the World XV he hasn’t coached internationally since but Mallett doesn’t look back with any regrets at how things panned out, especially with the high level of scrutiny that Test coaches have to endure.
“The fact that I am sitting here now, I’ve had two heart ablations, is probably because I turned it down,” he said of the missed opportunities with England.
“I get really passionately involved with rugby so if I invest as much as that and suddenly there’s social media and there’s criticism and all the stress, it is just horrible.
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“It’s like a boxer, when you start out you can take punches and then suddenly at the end of your career you can’t take them as well anymore.”