England head coach Eddie Jones has again insisted he will not lead the British and Irish Lions tour to New Zealand next year.
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All Blacks coach Hansen, whose team beat Australia in last year’s Rugby World Cup final, claimed Cheika’s failure to respond to the outspoken Jones through the media filtered onto the pitch.
Jones has relished ramping up the traditional sporting rivalry between England and former colony Australia and said his side’s win in Melbourne was “rope-a-dope” against a blunt Wallabies attack.
The All Blacks will face Wales at 7.35pm Saturday, the Wallabies will meet England at 10pm while the Springboks will host Ireland at 3am Sunday.
Johns, speaking on Triple M, said he was keen at the time to follow Jones and carve out a career for the Wallabies and has explained why he was helping the old enemy as they look to clinch a series whitewash against Australia.
“There’ll be a few changes”, he said.
Asked what the reaction from his Australian family and friends had been to England’s success on tour Jones quipped “I think my daughter got a bit of a hard time at work”. “They were obviously incredibly hurt by what happened in the World Cup and Eddie Jones has drawn on that pretty strongly and he is getting a response”, he said.
“We’d like to put together our best 80 because we still haven’t seen the best of this team”.
“I haven’t said one disrespectful thing about Australia, I haven’t said one thing disrespectful about his coaching”, Jones said.
“So if I took the Lions job I’d have to spend anywhere from six-to-12 months not doing that”.
“I can understand it’s a great thing that people might want Eddie to do the job because he’s been so successful in the eight games he’s had with us, but it ain’t going to change”. We are on a learning curve and we want to keep improving.
“It’s nice to win, to have the series done, but we want to win 3-0, then no one can argue that you’re not the better team”.
The key is to stay in the top three until May next year when the 2019 World Cup pools are drawn to avoid another group of death as happened last year.
“We’re not going to lose our belief because we’ve lost a game, we’re going to back our guys as we always do and prepare to be the best we can this weekend and when we get to the next Test after that, we’ll try and do the same”.
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Cheika said he wasn’t motivated by anything people said about him in the media.
