Eddie Jones, fresh off his second stint as Australia's head coach, presented a vision of a faster Japan national rugby team Thursday, when he was introduced by the Japan Rugby Football Union for his second stint as head coach.
The 63-year-old Jones led the Brave Blossoms at the 2015 Rugby World Cup in England, where they won three pool-stage games, including one of the sport's greatest upsets, a 34-32 win over South Africa.
He resigned from his Australia post after the Wallabies failed to make it out of the pool stage at a World Cup for the first time this year, when there were reports that Jones had been in contact with the JRFU, something the body's president, Masato Tsuchida, rejected.
"We started with a field of 80 qualified candidates, narrowed that down to a short list and after interviewing Eddie in December, decided on bringing him back," said Tsuchida, who admitted he had dined with Jones and his wife this year before Jones took the Australia job.
Jones had been contacted in the summer while coaching Australia, Tsuchida said, by a search company wanting to pick his brain in order to understand the demands of the Japan position in their effort to find the next coach.
"I didn't have an interview until December," Jones said. "Everyone is entitled to their opinion. I can only control what I did, and that sits well with me."
Jones said he was "honored and privileged" to be back and hoped to shape a national rugby identity that focuses on speed, player development and a way of thinking in which players can seamlessly slot into the national team from either university or corporate clubs.
"Having left here in 2015 and seen the development in rugby in Japan, it's such an exciting opportunity, having come back and watched the development of League One, the health of the Japanese universities, and the general feel of how important rugby is to Japanese society now," said Jones, who has been hired through the 2027 World Cup in Australia.
He said in between the start of the 2015 World Cup and now the national team had risen in importance and he was excited to be a part of the push for Japan to be among the world's top teams.
"I'm looking forward to the task of creating a Japanese side that has real identity, that has a point of difference," he said. "Because we are a smaller team, we need to play the game faster: faster with our feet, faster with our heads than the opposition."
"I'm looking forward to getting stuck into it and taking Japan forward."
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