Care's belated whistleblowing reveals toxicity of the silence that underpinned Jones regime

According to Care, Jones's players felt 'like characters in a dystopian novel'

- Robert Kitson

It has taken a while to trickle out but the full and frank verdict of the players is finally in. "It was like living in a dictatorship," writes Danny Care in his new autobiography, Everything Happens for a Reason, serialised in the Sunday Times.

"Remember what it felt like when someone was being bullied at school and you were just glad it wasn't you? That was the vibe."

The England regime to which he was referring - shock, horror - was that of Eddie Jones. According to Care, Jones's players felt "like characters in a dystopian novel" at times. "Everything's a test," they would whisper to each other, trying to steel themselves for whatever was about to follow.

"Did Eddie rule by fear?" asks Care rhetorically, at one point. "Of course he did, everyone was bloody terrified of him."

If all this sounds more like a now-disgraced boarding school in the 1970s than a professional sporting environment that's often how it seems to have felt to those at the sharp end. Which raises any number of questions before Saturday's England game against Australia, who are coincidentally also still recovering from a dose of Jones's own-brand medicine after failing to make the knockout phase at last year's World Cup. The most important being how and why it took so long for those inside the camp to tell it like it was.