In fairness to Eddie Jones, he has made the national interest of Beating England even more gratifying than usual.
Thanks to some sleuthing by Second Captains, we now know that Jones doesn't just reserve his verbal grenades and dodgy jokes for press conferences, and is prone to peppering antiseptic corporate motivation talks with a couple of barbs.
Last year, Jones was invited to give a corporate motivational speech and was joined on stage by Mike Lynch, former Major of the British Special Forces. Lynch is of Irish extraction, which led to Jones to try a bit of humour toward the end of his 20-minute address.
Jones' England, of course, last year equalled a world record by avoiding defeat in all but one of 23 Tests. That sole defeat was inflicted by Ireland in Dublin a year ago, which Jones recalled by saying that England had lost "to the scummy Irish".
We've played 23 Tests, we've only lost one Test to the scummy Irish. I'm still dirty about that game. But we'll get that back; we'll get them back. We've got them next year at home, we'll get them back. We'll get them back. I think we're playing them in the fourth round of the Six Nations last year, so we'll get them back. We'll get them back.
You can watch the clip below, courtesy of Second Captains.
"We've only lost one test to the scummy Irish...we'll get em back" - Eddie Jones, 2017. Our scummy hands are just going to leave this here?.
More on this in today's ????????? special. Plus Ken on Jose. Go get it ? https://t.co/TXILnN6ZbI pic.twitter.com/VGiNjIEcPv
— Second Captains (@SecondCaptains) March 14, 2018
Earlier in the clip, Jones joked that Wales is "this little shit place with 3 million people".
UPDATE:
Tonight, Eddie Jones has released an apology the comments:
I apologise unreservedly for any offence caused - no excuses and I shouldn't have said what I did. I'm very sorry.
His apology was echoed by a RFU spokeswoman, who said "Eddie has apologised for his inappropriate remarks, and the RFU is also very sorry for any offence caused and will apologise to the IRFU and WRU."
If, for some reason, you'd like to watch the address in full, it's available here.
