Eddie Jones casts Leinster’s power game as the template for England

There is nothing new about the observation that rugby is a game of increasing power but, if we await the point in history when modern players have wrung every last morsel of actuated power from their jacked-up bodies, that longed-for plateauing-off has yet to be reached. The size of players reached that stage more than 10 years ago. There are signs it may even be falling. But the power of them, the sheer power, continues to escalate.

To watch Eddie Jones wrestle with this conundrum is poignant. England’s coach is, by rugby standards, small of body and large of brain, but there was almost a despairing tone to his musings this week as he announced his latest squad, which will gather on Richmond Hill on Sunday evening for a three-day camp.

All the more poignant, given that not so very long ago – well, the 1980s anyway – that same body of Jones’s, albeit 40-odd years more youthful, belonged to a first-class front-row forward. Now, as the brain cried out like Captain Kirk for more power, the 1980s seemed a very long way away after all.

A word cloud of Jones’s musings this past week would feature “Leinster”, “Manu Tuilagi” (a lot), “Joe Cokanasiga” and “Henry Arundell”. Jones cited power, pace and guts as the holy trinity of international rugby. Arundell, the new sensation from London Irish, scores highly in the second category and sufficiently in the first. Jones watches with interest to see how he rates in the third.

Being of Pacific island descent, Tuilagi and Cokanasiga are rich in pace and power. Both return from injury, with Tuilagi’s comeback particularly cherished. If Jones is calling for more power, his favoured source is of little secret. “It’s a struggle,” he says. “If you haven’t got the power to win collisions,