The former Canterbury Bulldog who has immortalised Japan’s famous upset over the Springboks in the World Cup 2015 in film says mastermind coach Eddie Jones has been planning to beat New Zealand in Saturday’s World Cup semi-final for the same length of time as “the Brighton miracle”.
And given his international success with four different countries, Max Mannix says Rugby Australia would be mad to not talk to Jones about returning home and replacing Michael Cheika as Wallabies coach.
"My answer would be absolutely he should be pursued for that role,” Mannix said.
"Four World Cups, four different countries, and he has fabulous results every time. This is a guy who knows how to win.”
Mannix is a former rugby league winger for the Bulldogs and Illawarra who has made a successful career for himself in film and television, mostly in Japan.
After a chance meeting in a Tokyo cafe in 2012, Mannix became a defence consultant for Jones as he attempted to turn the Japanese rugby team from global easy beats to the team who astounded the world by beating two-time champions South Africa at the 2015 Rugby World Cup.
The victory, comfortably the biggest upset in World Cup history, has been made into a feature film by Mannix called “The Brighton Miracle”, with Star Wars and Once were Warriors star Temura Morisson playing Jones.
Exciting News for our Australian Supporters
— The Brighton Miracle ブライトン ミラクル (@BrightonMiracle) October 4, 2019
Below are the @HoytsAustralia cinemas that will be showing The Brighton Miracle from 31 October
Sydney - Chatswood, Warringah Mall, Eastgardens
Melbourne - Eastland, Highpoint
Brisbane - Stafford
Check online for showing times pic.twitter.com/6CdRu7R5O8
Ahead of the Australian release of the movie on October 31, writer/director Mannix spoke to RUGBY.com.au about his unique, up-close insights into Jones as a coach and man, the Springbok upset, Japanese rugby and how Jones has been planning an English victory over New Zealand for as long as he did the Brighton Miracle.
JAPAN’S JOURNEY
Soon after Eddie Jones took over the Japanese national team in 2012, Mannix was in the cafe of a hotel the pair both happened to be staying in.
Mannix, who played for the Bulldogs and Steelers between 1984 and 1988 had been living in Japan as a writer and filmmaker and was working on a project for NHK, the local equivalent of the ABC.
"I just went over and said “g’day” and wished him well with Japan and we had a bit of a chat,” Mannix said.
"We talked a bit about rugby league and rugby, and I mentioned Warren Ryan as being a previous coach I’d had. And Warren was very defence oriented, so we started talking about defence.”
Jones asked Mannix for his email address, and said he had a question he’d send through later.
That night an email came through with vision of “every try Japan had conceded the year before”.
“It was a fairly long link, and Eddie being Eddie, he just very succinctly in a one-liner said: “Who is at fault and how do we fix it?”,” Mannix recalls.
"I thought 'geez this is going to be a long email'.”
Mannix went through them all, identified some systemic faults in all the errors and after he sent back his reply, Jones invited him to a Brave Blossoms training camp.
So began a three-year consultancy with Japan for Mannix, that allowed him not only to study Jones from up-close, but gave him ground level access to the planning - and execution of - one of rugby’s most historic World Cup heists.
And ultimately the birth of Japan as a rising rugby nation, which so impressively continued at the 2019 Rugby World Cup.
Jones, the man and the coach, was at the heart of it all, says Mannix - and his movie sets out to tell the Jones story as much as anything.
"I don’t think Japan rugby knew what they got when they got Eddie Jones,” Mannix said.
"There is so much to Eddie. He was the token Asian kid in post-war Australia, he’d always been pushed around, he’d always been told he wasn’t good enough and he didn’t belong.
"And those things change a person. He becomes the person he has become. When he was at Randwick, he was a noted sledger but when he was a young kid, he wasn’t that guy. Life changed him.
“You compare him to the previous (Japan) coach, John Kirwan. John Kirwan is a white guy, he grew up in New Zealand, he is a big guy, he’s talented, he’s successful, he plays for the All Blacks. Did he work hard? Of course he did. But his circumstances and life path were totally different to Eddie.
"So it is a different dynamic when Eddie comes in, and when it gets to Eddie being the coach, he is the guy who comes in and says: 'Aren’t you guys sick of being pushed around? Aren't you guys sick of losing? We are going to win this’.”
When the Rugby World Cup draw was announced in 2013, Jones circled their clash with the Springboks as the game they would target for a win. The two-time World Cup winners."Whereas previous coaches had always rested players against the big nations to try and get their win against the likes of a Canada, Eddie didn’t want to,” Mannix said.
"When they were drawn against South Africa, he said: 'Mate, we’re going to win this game’.
"And right from the get-go, he said 'we’re going to beat them, this is how we are going to beat them, this is why we are going to beat them'. And he never relented from that.”
Jones trained the Brave Blossoms harder than they’d even known in the past, and players have spoken about the fact they were discussing how to beat South Africa from two years before they played.
BLOSSOM BELIEF
Did Jones really, genuinely believe they could beat South Africa, you ask?
Or was it just a tactic to get Japan to start thinking like a tier one team?
"That's a great question. One of the things I loved about my relationship with Eddie was because I am not a lifetime coach, he had his other coaches who were always coaches, but I was a bit different. So he’d send me a text and he’d say “let’s have a red”, during training camp,” Mannix said.
"So he said to me, probably on three occasions, in the whole time frame, you could almost see him drift for a moment and he’d say: 'do you think we can win?'.
"And I’d say: 'yeah, I do’.
"And just for those few seconds, it was wonderful to see a little bit of vulnerability. And then he’d snap back into it and say: ‘We have to win mate, we have to win', and he’d get back into it.
“I guess if you are trying to get people to have confidence in themselves, he really tried to nurture that through. Did he believe it?
“I think he believed it was possible. He would say things like: 'we have to be at our best, and hope they’re not quite at theirs'.
"He predicted it all, that’s for sure.
"He’d say: ‘They will definitely underestimate us, there is no way they will have their eyes on us, they will have their eyes on Samoa and Scotland. But we have our eyes on them, and they don’t know that. So all of these things are working in our favour, the fact that we are Japan, the fact that we have a bad record, we are not big guys, all of those things work in our favour because they will underestimate us. They won’t see us coming. So if we are right and they’re not, we give ourselves a chance’.”
The day arrived with Japan in superb shape, and with a newly developed skill-and-pace gameplan. And just as Jones predicted, the Springboks’ minds were elsewhere.
Japan won the game and, in a sign of their Jones-boosted psyche, not by shooting to a lead and hanging on, either. They scored the last try to win the game.
Mannix, who didn’t attend the tournament because of a clash with a movie shoot in Canada, immediately saw the potential for the story of famous win - and all that went into it - to be told in a film.
"The key motivator was everyone had seen the result and loved it, but no-one really knew the underpinning story of it,” Mannix said.
"So that, for me, was the motivator. I started thinking geez if people knew the amount of work that really went on, and knew Eddie, Michael Leitch. And so on. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought those elements were key to the result.
"Were they better rugby players? Not really. But on that day they were.
"I thought after the emotion dies down, I’ll see if I can make a decision that is devoid of emotion and come about January 2016, I contacted Eddie and said there is a really interesting story here. I think it would be a good film.
"We discussed it over the phone for a fair bit, because obviously I wanted his support. And he said yeah, sounds good, he’d support it and that’s where it started.
WORLD CUP WAVE
Jones was poached by England and Jamie Joseph took over as Japan coach, and though the results weren’t brilliant during the next three years, the Brave Blossoms made another global impression at the 2019 Rugby World Cup by beating Ireland, Scotland and making the finals for the first time.
They’re now ranked in the top ten.
Mannix says there is a straight line back to the work of Jones.
"I would like to think of it as the time and people that created the change. Eddie was definitely the catalyst for that change,” Mannix said.
"If we are talking about where did this belief come from, and where did this style of play come from, it definitely came from Eddie.”
Mannix is proud of Japan rugby in 2019 but says the feat of the Brighton miracle remains in a category of its own.
"If you look at the reality of what happened, somebody said to me Japan beat Ireland, it was fantastic. When Japan beat South Africa, they beat a two-time winner. A champion team,” Mannix said.
"No disrespect to Ireland but they’ve never made it past the quarters.”
EDDIE’S ENGLAND
Mannix says the power of Jones is being able to plan and build for long-term success at World Cups in an age where a voracious public want success every single weekend, and can get nasty when they don’t get it.
"It’s very hard to have that long-term success, particularly in the age of social media when everyone has an opinion,” Mannix said.
"When he went to England, he talked about them being the best team in the world and what he meant by that was winning the World Cup. Because that’s what you are judged on in rugby. The rankings are a joke mostly, we know that. He doesn’t care about that system.
“And we all know New Zealand are the team to beat. That’s the wonderful thing. For all those years he has been saying they have to beat New Zealand to be no.1. Now they’re there, with that chance.”
Mannix caught up with Jones after the draw for the 2019 Rugby World Cup, and calculating the likely pool and finals path, chatted about a likely clash with the Kiwis before the final.
Jones was excited about that, and on Saturday that’s what will happen. England and the All Blacks in a semi-final.
"I said: 'well it’s obvious you’re going to hit them in the semi' and he goes: 'mate, perfect, nearly all the times they lose in World Cups, it’s in semis and quarters. They don’t finals often’,” Mannix said.
"He’s done it once before, remember, (with Australia) in 2003 and that was after they’d got a flogging in the Bledisloe, too.
“Just as when the draw was done for 2015, he had every Japanese player geared up to beat South Africa, he has every England geared up to beat New Zealand. Trust me on that one.”
CALL AUSTRALIA HOME
With Michael Cheika moving on, Rugby Australia are looking for the next candidate to coach the Wallabies.
While Dave Rennie is reportedly the hottest of favourites, Mannix shares the thoughts of many in believing Jones would be the best man for the long-haul job of taking the Wallabies back to the top.
"Any corporation you are trying to turn around, it takes longer than a week or a month or even a year,” Mannix said.
“But is England rugby in a better place now than when he came into it? Absolutely. Is Japan rugby in a better place now than when he came in in 2012? Absolutely.
"When you look at those results and you project ahead and say “if we got Eddie Jones, what do we expect?”.
"You have to be prepared to go through that four-year build-up period because when you get to the World Cup, that team is going to be so well prepared.
"What comes with that is a national momentum, and that’s what is happening in England and in Japan. You get a national momentum behind a side that has a really good chance. And that’s what I think would happen with Australia.
"My answer would be absolutely he should be pursued the role. Four World Cups, four different countries, and he has fabulous results every time."
