Eddie Jones has returned fire in an escalating row over the number of injuries sustained at England training camps, insisting the Premiership clubs have “no right” to tell him how to coach his side following criticism from the Bath owner, Bruce Craig.

Craig described the toll of England camps on his club as “totally unacceptable”, adding “there has got to be significant questions asked about duty of care” after Beno Obano was ruled out for a year last week, taking to five the number of Bath players to sustain serious injuries under Jones’s watch.

Jones’s methods came under further scrutiny on Tuesday when Ben Te’o was ruled out of the South Africa tour next month, having become the 15th player to go down during one of his notoriously intense camps.

Hitting back in a developing club versus country row, however, Jones said: “We prepare players for Test matches. I don’t think anyone at a club has the right to tell a coach how to train a Test team. I don’t have any concerns. We train appropriately for Test match rugby. The only reason I’d alter it is if we need to train harder, or we need to train lighter, to be at our best for Test matches.”

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An injury audit, commissioned jointly by the Rugby Football Union and Premiership Rugby and released in March, showed that the severity of injuries sustained in England training drastically rose during Jones’s first season in charge.

It showed that the “burden of injuries” – which takes into account both their frequency and their severity – more than doubled at England training in the 2016-17 season, compared to the previous campaign. But Jones disputed Craig’s claim that the injury toll is “unacceptable”.

He said: “I haven’t seen any figures to suggest they are, no one in our staff has suggested they are. But Bruce is obviously an expert in training-ground injuries, so I’ll have to be subservient to his greater knowledge.

“You never want to get players injured, you’re always looking to train appropriately for the game. We play a collision sport so unfortunately you do get injuries. We try to do everything we can to ensure we don’t but sometimes you do.”

Ben Te’o out of England tour to South Africa after injury in training Read more

Jones finalised his 34-man squad to face the Springboks on Tuesday with Te’o taking to 24 the number of players unavailable, either in need of a rest or injured. He joins seven others who toured New Zealand with the British & Irish Lions last summer.

“As you see on the tour, 17 players from the Lions and we’ve got nine available and a lot of those injuries have happened in games not training,” Jones said. “We realise the players have played a number of games and the players will train appropriately.”

Of more pressing concern to Jones is ending a four-game losing run and the absence of Te’o does not help his cause. It places greater importance on the fitness of Billy Vunipola, who made only his second start since January in the Premiership final with Saracens against Exeter last weekend.

“We still have a concern over his hamstring and how fit he is going to be,” Jones told the BBC.

“It’s still a little bit tight so we have just got to be careful with him. We have gone through a long period without Billy and while he’s a great player we have been able to cope without him. We want him back in the side, but if he’s not we will work out another way to play.”

Jones meanwhile, continues to seek an edge during his much-maligned camps. He still places great emphasis on “tactical periodisation” and has recently sought the advice of Vincent Walsh, a professor of human brain research he described as “the world’s foremost expert in learning”.

Jones said: “We are trying to change behaviour so it is learning about how humans operate. He came to our camp last week and is coming in this week and is going to provide a lecture to the coaches about it.

“To win the World Cup, what’s the advantage we can have? We can learn faster than the opposition. One of the things I have always spoken about with this English side is our slowness to adapt. [Having] the courage to make those decisions quickly is something we are continually working on.”