Two titles in two campaigns has the Australian wondering what all the fuss is about when it comes to the business of dominating England’s local rivals on a consistent basis.
England stand five games from an unprecedented third successive outright championship.
Yet he is aware that his players, raised on Murrayfield horror stories and Parisian blood baths, could be susceptible to the psychological challenge of a season when three of England’s five games are away from Twickenham.
“There’s all these premeditated ideas of what you can do and you can’t do. The home and away in the Six Nations is shoved down your throat consistently,” said Jones.
“It’s not just the media, it’s the supporters as well. People come up to you and say ‘goodness me, it’s going to be a hard Six Nations for you, you’ve got three away games, how are you going to cope with that?’
“It’s the same messages all the time and if you get the same message all time, you start to believe it. It’s like the team is being brainwashed into thinking that way.
“Our job is to create a team that doesn’t believe it, that’s good enough to think it doesn’t matter where we play, we’re good enough to win.
“We have got to be a team that, regardless of where we go, we just roll up and play well. It doesn’t matter what the referee does, doesn’t matter what the crowd’s like, what the weather’s like, we just roll up and play well. Because that’s what you’ve got to be like to win the World Cup.
“I was brought up in a place where you don’t worry about it. The better the team you are, the better you are away from home. That’s all we’re aiming to be.” Plenty of good England teams, including Sir Clive Woodward’s World Cup winners, experienced what it was like to be favourites headed into the championship – as Jones’s side are – only to take a fall on the road.
“I’m a novice at it, so my apologies, but I think there’s so much premeditation of what’s going to happen that it becomes the belief. And as soon as that becomes a belief, it can become reality,” said Jones.
“How can you have great teams that win every game but they don’t win the Grand Slam? That’s happened consistently in the history of Six Nations. Is their skill level less, are they less fit? No, it’s all up here. So our great challenge is to get up here right.”
To help in this respect, England have a new psychologist on board this season in Dan Abrahams, who also works with Premier League club Bournemouth.
His main task ahead of this weekend’s game against Italy will be to guard against complacency given England have never lost to the Azzurri.
Not there is too much risk of that in Jones’s exacting England set-up.
“The environment is set up so you don’t ever get into a state where you feel bedded in and extremely comfortable,” said England prop Harry Williams.
“The training is designed to keep you in a constantly uncomfortable state.”
As an example, the suspended pair of James Haskell and Joe Marler, were doing wrestling drills at 6.30am yesterday at the squad’s Pennyhill Park base and they aren’t even available to England until game three of the championship.
Jones rated the squad session last Friday in Portugal as the best he has overseen during his time with England.
Yet all the painstaking preparation and mental fine-tuning in the world cannot inoculate a side entirely from this championship’s dark magic.
If Jones needs a reminder of the Six Nations’ capacity to bite a side in the bottom, he has a vivid one in last season’s failed Grand Slam mission in Ireland – his one defeat in 23 games as England coach.
“I can’t work it out,” he said. “We thought we had a great prep, we thought the players were all into it, the players thought they were all onto it, and it just didn’t work out for us. Sometimes that happens and you just put it in the ‘too hard’ basket.”
