England’s succession plans flawed given rugby’s ever shifting landscape

It may be a touch unfair – albeit good fun – to imagine the Succession screenwriters are overseeing the Rugby Football Union’s transition to life after Eddie Jones. No prizes for guessing who fulfils the Logan Roy role and there seem parallels too, between Kendall and Steve Borthwick, someone who has at times appeared the natural successor but about whom doubts over his suitability to be top dog have lingered.

Sometimes though, life at the RFU can seem stranger than fiction. The chief executive, Bill Sweeney, and the performance director, Conor O’Shea, were last week at pains to point out that there is a robust succession plan in place. It is apparently called Project Everest, there is a “war room” that features “contracts and all sorts of things” relating to potential candidates and the RFU wants to appoint an Englishman. Ideally, an entire English coaching team and the plan would be to make the appointment next summer. They may well work under Jones in the run-up to the 2023 World Cup and apparently he is happy at the prospect. It is also criteria which, on the face of it, makes Andy Farrell a far harder appointment to make given his current commitments.

If the Succession comparison is a stretch so, too, is the RFU’s suggestion that such a model has worked in France recently and can therefore be copied. Fabien Galthié was, in April of 2019, announced as Jacques Brunel’s successor after the World Cup later that year and joined his coaching staff in May. The comparisons should stop there, however, because Brunel was a stop-gap appointment, out of his depth and in need of support. France were an unholy mess during the 2019 Six Nations and already the priority was the 2023 World Cup which they will host. Jones, on the