Why Eddie Jones Is Wrong to Stick Rather Than Twist with England Old Guard

The England rugby union team will open their latest new era on Saturday with a trip to Murrayfield, Scotland, where the result is perhaps more in the balance than it has been for a few years.

England arrive with no one sure of how much new head coach Eddie Jones' philosophy has sunk in since he gathered his squad together for the first time, while hosts Scotland show signs of a team ready to progress from the 2015 Rugby World Cup, where they came within a whisker of a semi-final place.

This could have been a chance for Jones to tear that underachieving English World Cup side to pieces. Instead, the team that was booted out of its own tournament at the earliest opportunity has hardly been changed at all.

Injury to Jonny May means there will be one alteration to the back three that was first choice under former head coach Stuart Lancaster, while the midfield will house players very much of the last era—although in the case of Owen Farrell, his selection at No. 12 was forced on Jones due to injuries to other options.

Jonathan Joseph will start outside him. The Bath man exploded onto the scene during the 2015 RBS Six Nations, but he was injured before he could make an impact in the World Cup. Since then, the name on everyone's lips as far as the No. 13 jersey goes has been Wasps' Elliot Daly.

He has been figuratively banging the door down all season, and yet he was sent back to his club last week and now makes it to Murrayfield only as a reserve. Former Bath and England prop David Flatman was confused, for one:

Danny Care and George Ford, World Cup bit-part players, are there on merit, as is Chris Robshaw, whose form for Harlequins has demanded his inclusion at No. 6, even if Jones no longer sees him as captain material.

Billy Vunipola is retained as first-choice No. 8 when Thomas Waldrom has been the best player in the English league, and newcomer Josh Beaumont has been sent home.

And James Haskell will start in the much-debated No. 7 jersey unless Jack Clifford has convinced Jones otherwise, with the head coach admitting neither is the ideal man for the job, as reported by the Telegraph's Gavin Mairs.

This particular decision is vexing. Why pick a player you don't see as a natural there when you have Dave Ewers and Matt Kvesic at your disposal?

The Gloucester man must feel like the puppy in the pound who is often played with but never taken home. Lancaster used to pick him in his extended squads but then showed him the exit from Pennyhill Park when it came to cull time—Jones has done the same.

This is despite a string of impressive performances for the Cherries this season, characterised by the traits no player Lancaster ever picked in the position possessed.

Jones has decided to go for a short-term fix when he had a chance to assess a potential long-term solution. After all his talk of his love for a natural openside, he has eschewed his only options and gone for a make-do-and-mend solution—the sort of solution he castigated the previous regime for, let's not forget, per his comments in a World Cup column for the Daily Mail.

Steffon Armitage, the dark cloud that never left the airspace above Lancaster's time in charge, questioned the decision in an interview with 888Sport.com (h/t MailOnline): "Kvesic is a really good young player who is coming along nicely and he will be one of those players up there. He deserves a shot at playing in the Six Nations but now he has been released back to his club. He was one of the guys I was looking forward to seeing."

In the second row, it looks like the greater experience of Courtney Lawes and Joe Launchbury will be deployed, with George Kruis as back-up and Maro Itoje another reserve who will only figure if Lawes does not report fully fit by the weekend, having originally been cut.

Lawes and Launchbury are still young and have oodles to offer, but Itoje's rejection was a little saddening.

The Saracens man has been head and shoulders better than Lawes so far this term. Pairing him with Launchbury or his club-mate Kruis would have been a thrilling prospect, but Jones won't take the risk.

It's another choice Armitage doesn't understand: "You have to put these players in when it's their time and you feel with Itoje that he's got there. He's doing it week in, week out for Saracens. Sometimes it's best to throw them into the deep end because otherwise when are you going to do it? This is the perfect time to do it."

What England fans are left with is to hope that in less than three weeks Jones has managed to transform largely the same crop of players who failed so desperately in the autumn into a dynamic outfit capable of playing an entirely different brand of rugby.

The reality is that he has picked a team of low risk (ignoring the captain debate for a moment), preferring to get away with a win ground out through experience rather than blood the new talent at his finger tips and let the chips fall where they may.

Ask yourself this: If England want to get back to being the best, i.e. winning in Japan in 2019, will a good result with a familiar team against Scotland in 2016 be remembered as the defining moment they set out on that path?

Or, had Jones decided to blood four or five players who will be part of the 2019 World Cup picture, risking defeat by inexperience, would that moment of loss be looked upon as more significant, as the moment those men started their journey?

It took a fearful hammering in 1998 by Australia with a scratch England team for Clive Woodward to decide to tear up the playbook and find another way. Not many of those players survived, but Jonny Wilkinson, Phil Vickery and Danny Grewcock all made the 2003 World Cup-winning squad, while Graham Rowntree and Austin Healey only missed it by a whisker. They all played that day.

Jones has already shown that he can't bear the thought of risking a backward step for the sake of future leaps forward, and in that, he may well have missed a trick.

My England XV to face Scotland:

15. Mike Brown

14. Anthony Watson

13. Eliot Daly

12. Owen Farrell

11. Jack Nowell

10. George Ford

9. Danny Care

8. Thomas Waldrom

7. Matt Kvesic

6. Chris Robshaw

5. Maro Itoje

4. Joe Launchbury

3. Kieran Brookes

2. Jamie George

1. Mako Vunipola