- Video
-
Club Roar
Captured a great grassroots sporting moment? We want to see it!Content Collections
The Roar Community
- Join
- Login
If the Waratahs were flying at the top of the Super Rugby table, and the transition toward Daryl Gibson taking over as coach had been underway for some time, you could easily conclude that balancing two jobs and switching between two hats isn’t really affecting Wallabies and Waratahs coach Michael Cheika.
However, things have been a bit up and down for the ‘Tahs in 2015.
Gibson, at least, is locked in now from 2016, and the transition can and will commence properly. Already, Gibson is managing recruitment and that makes perfect sense.
You would imagine that Gibson would now start taking on more and more of the off-field operations for the Waratahs, limiting Cheika to the week-to-week match preparation. Depending on how the Waratahs end up in the second half of the Super Rugby season, Gibson may well end up as the quasi-head coach and actually running everything.
Moreover, this would free Cheika up to spend more time on what is clearly his biggest job in 2015: readying the Wallabies for the Rugby World Cup in September and October.
But ‘biggest job in 2015′ doesn’t really do justice to what Cheika is actually facing. It is, without doubt, the biggest assignment of his rugby career.
The man who would’ve “given my right arm to play for Australia”, as he told me before the Super Rugby season started, has to construct his core game plan, identify the players best equipped to execute that game plan, and the coaches required to accurately portray the correct messages to the players.
Some of these tasks would already be done, or at least, be well evolved. It’s hard to imagine, for example, that he will be starting from a blank page and designing a whole new game plan. It will almost certainly be based on the methods and tactics that have brought him success with the Waratahs.
But Cheika will also know that what works or has worked well in the southern hemisphere doesn’t necessarily translate to success in the north. More specifically, he learned firsthand last November in the UK that set piece and breakdown presence will be even more crucial than in Super Rugby. And he’ll have known this from his time in Italy, Ireland, and France before that anyway.
Once the Webb Ellis trophy is on the line, it will only be ramp up more again. Entertaining, non-kicking, ball-in-hand, ‘stick to our identity’ rugby might win you a couple of pool games – and maybe not even that many in Australia’s pool – but it won’t get you far in the knockout stages.
Cheika has some pieces of his coaching puzzle in place already. Nathan Grey will continue in the defence role he commenced late last year, and Brumbies coach Stephen Larkham has been confirmed as his attack coach.
Michael Foley is supposedly still on the horizon as the forwards coach, but why has it taken so long? It may well be coincidence, but you have to wonder if the performance of the Force this year has worked against him. One minute he’s in demand, then the season started, and then nothing.
Regardless, the biggest test Cheika will face within this biggest test of his rugby career may well be winning over the Australian rugby public.
While Cheika couldn’t control how the Wallabies’ clipboard came to be his, he can certainly control his actions while holding said clipboard, and particularly any actions that may only further inflame what are already rocky perceptions of how he operates in some quarters.
Non-Waratahs supporters wouldn’t be naive or silly enough to expect equal representation from all five Australian sides, but they do want to see and hear the right messages about the team and the players at the appropriate times.
Nor is Wallabies selection a popularity contest, though. One fan’s ‘team to win the World Cup’ is another fan’s ‘all-time overrated XV’. The Waratahs’ title win in 2014 brought with it a new level of parochial support within Australian rugby, to the point that even a technicality issue – like Cheika’s “polite chat” with referee Jaco Peyper at halftime recently – can easily and quickly divide the support base.
Cheika has been clever in his Wallabies’ operations to date, though. Asking all four Super Rugby colleagues to join him on the European Tour quickly put to bed any line of thinking that this new regime was just going to be a ‘Tahs fest’.
Equally, where Cheika the Waratahs coach was seen at times as being less than forthcoming toward the media, Cheika the Wallabies coach has been positively charming. Heck, if I’ve already spoken to him about the Wallabies this year, then surely every other rugby writer in the country has too.
But as much as Cheika has to win over the public during the Rugby Championship and Bledisloe campaigns – and wins, or at worst spirited closely-fought losses will do the trick – the public also need to let him do the best job he can. That might even mean wearing some short-term pain while the combinations jell.
Every player, coach, trainer, and staff member associated with the Wallabies this year wants nothing but success. Every Australian rugby supporter wants the same thing.
For the sake of unity, in this of all years, maybe we should commit to staying on the same page and backing the coach to bring the success we all desire.