To listen to Eddie Jones chewing the fat on assorted podcasts this week is to admire the enduring thickness of his coaching skin. The old crocodile smile is still intact too, along with his sense of humour after an interaction in a lift with a fan after his Japan side’s 28-21 weekend defeat in Cardiff. As Jones later confided: “This Welsh bloke came up to me and said: ‘You almost look human with your glasses on.’”

Next up is a reunion with a few former friends – and foes – in Twickenham. While it is now almost four years since Jones was sacked by the Rugby Football Union, there remain mixed emotions on both sides. Those relieved to see him go in late 2022 will certainly not be too broken-hearted if there is a similar outcome to the last time a Jones-coached Japan came to Allianz Stadium two years ago and lost 59-14.

Yet England under Jones won 59 and drew two of their 81 matches and boasted a 73% winning record, superior to any other head coach before or since including Sir Clive Woodward. Amid the relentless churn of backroom staff and the Jones regime’s brutal excesses – the former England scrum-half Danny Care compared it to “living in a dictatorship, under a despot who disappeared people” – there were golden days, too.

The question, then and now, is whether the ends justified the means. In his 2024 autobiography, Care wrote: “Did Eddie rule by fear? Of course he did, everyone was bloody terrified of him.” Including a generation of younger players who were thrown in at the deep end before, in many cases, being abruptly jettisoned? In total 112 players were picked for England during the Jones era and many of their Test careers – there were 14 one-cap wonders and a further 18 with two caps – made the lifespan of the average mayfly feel protracted.

In certain cases, though, this “tough love” is belatedly paying dividends long after Jones’s exit. Take Alex Coles, whose first three caps coincided with the Australian’s farewell campaign in charge. The Northampton lock is now maturing into a fine international player but back then he was a wide-eyed novice. “It was daunting coming in at that time. As a young player coming through you hear all these stories about Eddie and stuff in camp. I was apprehensive and he certainly had that aura about him.”

Among Coles’s clearest memories remains the 2022 autumn Test against New Zealand. He wasn’t selected for the game but found himself deployed as a key figure by Jones during the buildup. “The chat was that they were going to try and get into our heads and wind us up. My sole role in the team session was to just try and wind the starters up.

“I was this fresh-faced 22-year-old, scared of all the older heads like Mako Vunipola, Owen Farrell and everyone else. Eddie would run behind the defensive line and be like: ‘You’re not winding them up enough, you’re not getting in their heads.’ So, because I’d run out of ideas, I ended up coming around the side and tackling the third man in a caterpillar ruck. I then got piled on by about four or five of the starters on the floor. After that Eddie said I’d trained really well!”

This sink or swim ethos basically mirrored Jones’s entire modus operandi. Having grown up in a tough school at Randwick, where he was coached by the wily Bob Dwyer and played alongside Michael Cheika, he was constantly seeking resilient individuals rather than looking to indulge fledgling “apprentices”. What no one has ever disputed, though, is Jones’s eye for an unpolished gem; in addition to Coles, Tommy Freeman, George Furbank and Alex Mitchell were all handed their first caps by Jones and have subsequently gone on to be influential Test performers.

Will Joseph, set to feature along with Henry Pollock and Max Ojomoh in a reshuffled England starting XV this weekend, was also given two minutes against Australia in Brisbane as a 20-year-old in 2022. Was he picked prematurely? Almost certainly. But is that proving helpful now? His teammate Coles, for his part, can now see the benefits of such experiences: “You felt a little bit on edge around Eddie but I’m so grateful to him because at that stage, in my own head, I didn’t really believe that I was ready for that level.

“He saw something in me, made me believe I could be at that international level and pushed me to work on my game. And even though I then dropped out of the team for a bit, I still think that without him it would have taken much longer to get to the point where I was ready. Mentally it was a bit of a challenge. You felt like you’d played a few games and done OK and then you’re out. But looking back now from a long-term point of view, I was a bit raw and mentally I probably wasn’t quite ready to be a consistent international player.”

In summary, Jones’s legacy remains a matter of debate. Both he and his successor, Steve Borthwick, can argue that, ultimately, the national team is only as strong as the development pipeline feeding it. And the 66-year-old Jones is also not wrong to suggest the number of absolute world-class players English rugby has produced since 2003 can be pretty much counted on the fingers of one hand. What hasn’t changed, either way, is the great survivor’s passion for rugby, nor his ability to divide a room.