World Rugby has named Michael Cheika as Coach of the Year. The decision is provocative because it overlooks Steve Hansen, who just led his troops to consecutive World Cups.

It certainly is provocative, but only mildly so. There can be only one winner and Cheika has done enough with the Wallabies in 2015 to deserve this accolade.

What World Rugby is saying is that Cheika’s success in taking a disfunctional group of players who could hardly beat a carpet and turning them, in a year, into a team of mates who contested the final of the 2015 Rugby World Cup tournament is a better coaching outcome than guiding the greatest rugby side in history to their second successive Webb Ellis trophy.

If you want to personalise this, look to Kurtley Beale. Beale’s behaviour during the Ewen McKenzie regime was totally obnoxious. It led to the downfall of McKenzie. It split the Wallabies. It brought disrepute to the Wallabies brand and to Australian rugby.

Cheika has helped to turn around Beale’s behaviour. And working to the mantra that “better people make better players” has revived the career of one of the most gifted footballers on the planet. What applies to Beale applies in differing degrees to all the other members of the Wallabies Rugby World Cup 2015 squad.

Beale and his teammates showed their esprit during that period when the Wallabies clawed back 14 points against the All Blacks and put the final in the balance. Beale ran amok against a defence that had seemed to be impregnable. His brilliant running and exceptional interceptions brought back memories of the youngster playing for Joeys all those years ago.

Seeing the confident and brave way the Wallabies fought back against the All Blacks in the Rugby World Cup 2015 final, from being down 21-3 to coming within four points of them with 20 minutes of play to go, was stimulating for Australian rugby supporters.

The Australian’s Wayne Smith captured this feeling of a new optimism about the possibilities in store for the Wallabies in an article that carried the positive headline: ‘The dawn of a new golden era’.

While the All Blacks might have won the 2015 Rugby World Cup tournament with another head coach, the Wallabies could not have clambered their way out of the “pool of death” and defeated Scotland and the Argentine Pumas in the finals before playing in the best Rugby World Cup final in terms of the quality of play, on both sides, without Cheika as head coach.

As the ARU’s media release noted: “Cheika took over the Wallabies’ reins less than a year out from the World Cup, on the eve of the team’s 2014 Spring Tour, which they finished with one win from four matches.”

The media release did not mention that the team was divided into two factions, a split essentially between a Brumbies/Reds grouping and a NSW Waratahs grouping.

The behaviour of several of the Wallabies had lapsed into mungo territory. There was an arrogance and nastiness about the behaviour of some of the senior players, on and off the field, that was frankly disgusting for supporters to be confronted with.

A year later, Cheika presented a team that had defeated the All Blacks at Sydney, one of only three losses that team suffered since its triumph in Rugby World Cup 2011. The Wallabies won The Rugby Championship for the first time since 2011 and then played off against the All Blacks in the final of Rugby World Cup 2015.

These results were important for Australian rugby. Even more important, in my opinion, is the way these results were achieved. Cheika’s Wallabies played enterprising and attractive rugby based around the traditional Australian values of running with the ball and aggressive defence.

It was this defence that provided one of the highlights of Rugby World Cup 2015 that will go down in the folklore of Australian rugby. With 13 men against Wales, in a must-win match, the Wallabies did not concede a point in seven minutes of fearless and accurate tackling.

It was as if the Wallabies on the field, the 13 of them, all had their Gregan’s tackle moments.

Cheika’s take on the defeat in the final against the All Blacks was exemplary. He and the Wallabies captain Stephen Moore admitted that their team had been defeated “square and fair”. Cheika was adamant that a “no-excuse” mentality had to prevail.

He told his players, too, that “we’ve got to keep growing” and that “this is just the start.”

This hard-headed, pragmatic and optimistic approach can only be helpful for the Wallabies. As the saying goes, you learn more from your losses than your wins. This is only true, though, if you take a “no-excuses” attitude to the losses.

What is unhelpful for the Wallabies moving forward has been some of the Australian rugby media’s efforts, from the usual suspects, to somehow insinuate that Cheika’s men were cheated out of a victory by an incompetently biased Welsh referee, Nigel Owens. These usual suspects were adopting their usual “all-excuses” attitude to the loss of the Rugby World Cup 2015 final.

On The Roar this sentiment has flourished, too, rather like a noxious weed that strangles the growth that Cheika is looking for going into the Rugby World Cup 2019 campaign.

So we have had the usual suspect, for instance, insisting that “the All Blacks received every crucial decision, or non-decision, from referee Nigel Owens .. Owens, by virtue of his appointment, had just been hailed as the world’s best referee and rightly so. It’s just that there wasn’t a whole lot of evidence of that at Twickenham early yesterday morning.”

For me, this is just nonsense.

Admittedly, on the advice of the assistant referee Wayne Barnes, Owens missed an obvious forward pass by the All Blacks which was followed by a ruck that yielded them a penalty which Dan Carter booted over.

There was a head-high tackle by Jerome Kaino which was not missed, despite the ignorant call about it from the Fox Sports commentary team. The penalty was awarded and then the advantage was waived after the Wallabies made a break that resulted soon after in a try for them.

And Ben Smith was yellow-carded for a lift tackle that was, he explained to Owens, helped by Drew Mitchell jumping into the tackle.

Against this, Sekope Kepu was on a mission during the final to smash Carter off the field with high and late tackles. Owens warned the Wallabies prop that a “third time” and he would be in the sin bin. A third infringement, though, on Nehe Milner-Skudder was not even penalised.

In fact, the general disregard for the heads of the All Blacks, including David Pocock’s stomp on Richie McCaw which had him reeling, revealed a nasty side to the Wallabies game plan during the final.

Cheika’s success as a coach has a number of elements to it. He is, and this is fundamental to all great coaches, very good at handling his players. The great coaches understand that the players are individuals who require individual responses from their coach. But the esprit of the team trumps the needs of the individual.

Cheika understands that rugby needs to be played with intelligently and positively. He encourages his players to be passionate about their team and their own performances. Good.

He builds teams that become successful. He did this at Leinster, the Waratahs and now with the Wallabies.

The use of David Pocock as a number 8 but going in second in the tackle to make the pilfer was a bold concept and could re-define the role of the number 8 for teams like England that don’t like to play even one fetcher, let alone two.

Where Cheika, so far, is limited as a coach is that he does not seem to be flexible tactically or strategically. His teams seem to play one way and do not vary that one way very much from opponent to opponent.

He is inclined, too, to get agitated a lot. He got angry, for instance, at a media conference after the final about the publication of the Wallabies’ prepared notes about their tactics. But what does he expect when a coach holds the team notes in such a way that a photo of them reveals all?

What struck me about this storm in a teacup is that the notes, with their comments on how Carter steps to the side and how Kieran Read is shaky under the high ball, were correct in their analysis.

But they weren’t implemented during the final. Why? Read wasn’t tested under a high ball, nor was Milner-Skudder, even though both of them were shaky in this aspect of their play during the tournament.

The fact of the matter is that Cheika was out-coached in the final by Hansen and his team of experts.

The Wallabies, for instance, used a complicated defensive systems from defensive lineouts that took into account the formation of the lineout and what play they expected the All Blacks to run.

The All Blacks threw the ball in quickly before the Wallabies could get their defensive system properly set up. And the Wallabies could not cope with the tactic.

The first lineout of the game saw the Wallabies defenders trying to get into position while Ma’a Nonu burst through a gap to set up an early assault on the Wallabies try line.

That burst by Nonu and the confident, assertive All Blacks attack launched from it, in retrospective, was as crucial to the outcome of the final as Quade Cooper’s over-cooked kick-off in the semi-final of Rugby World Cup 2011.

There was no plan either, or seemingly no plan, to handle Nonu who seemed to be twice the size of Matt Giteau. As a consequence, Nonu ran amok. Why wouldn’t Cheika use Tevita Kuridrani, a monster like Nonu, as Nonu’s opposite in defence, and line up Giteau against the smaller Conrad Smith?

The Wallabies did not show anything new on attack, either. The All Blacks had Julian Savea and Milner-Skudder playing a lot in the middle of the field, often one-off the rucks and making life difficult for the props who were trying to tackle them.

I thought, too, that Cheika got sucked into the Pocock-McCaw contest when for a couple of years now McCaw has not really tried to be a fetcher. Big Brodie Retallick, for instance, got as many turnovers as McCaw. The doyens have been going on about Pocock’s great game but, in reality, the All Blacks and McCaw played away from him and exploited those gaps further out where he should have been.

My point here is that you could see the All Blacks playing to a series of patterns that they understood, which were new to the Wallabies and which worked. You did not see the same sort of clarity in the game plan of the Wallabies. They showed the All Blacks the same old stuff and the All Blacks defence, aside from a rolling maul and freakish bounce of the ball, was never really under pressure to work out what was happening.

I have said this before and will continue to say it until someone in the ARU gets the message: bring in Rod Macqueen to play the wise man role for the Wallabies that Wayne Smith (the New Zealand Smith) does for the All Blacks.

Smith organised the All Blacks defence which was virtually water-tight during the final. Macqueen introduced smart new defensive systems for the Brumbies that coaches from all over the world came to Canberra to study.

Smith also played a sort of devil’s advocate role in the All Blacks coaching system. He would tell Hansen how he would defeat the All Blacks if he were coaching against them and this expert information would be factored into the All Blacks game plan.

No wonder the All Blacks seemed to know what the Wallabies were going to do even before they did it.

Take the first Wallabies kick-off, for instance. Bernard Foley kicked it with precision to the best leaper and catcher in the All Blacks pack, Sam Whitelock. Coincidence? I don’t think so because Foley’s second kick-off had the same outcome.

Then there is the matter of how the Wallabies were totally out-thought when they threw the ball into the lineout.

The All Blacks knew that playing David Pocock and Michael Hooper in the same backrow meant they were one short of a lineout jumper. Where was the Wallabies plan to make their lineouts work under this difficulty?

There was none.

The All Blacks double-teamed the front of the lineout and forced the Wallabies to throw long where Whitelock, the best lineout jumper in world rugby, had a field day with steals. In the first half of the final, the All Blacks got three lineout steals and a couple of penalties which more than made up for Pocock’s theft of All Blacks ball at the rucks.

These lineout steals meant that the All Blacks had 80 per cent of possession in the first half, which explains, in turn, their 16-3 lead at half-time.

This brings me to a final point about Cheika as a coach. He is reluctant, or so it seems to me, to bring in new talent to an established side.

Knowing the weakness of the Wallabies lineout, something that is not new, why wasn’t the Brumbies giant Rory Arnold given a place in the squad rather than carrying Henry Speight or Joe Tomane?

The tone of this may seem a little pessimistic and hardly enthusiastic about Cheika’s qualities as a coach. This view is not my intention. I have written previously on The Roar about his Power of One impact on turning the fortunes of the Waratahs and the Wallabies.

What I am doing here is playing Devil’s Advocate, the role assigned to an expert investigator to look into the life of a potential saint from the point of view of opposition to this elevation.

The ARU’s media release on Cheika’s achievements made this strong case (which I agree with) for him winning the Coach of the Year title. “The World Rugby Coach of the Year award is further recognition of his success as a mentor, in a career that has seen him become the only coach to win top domestic awards in both the southern and northern hemisphere competition.”

I believe that Cheika is up to the challenges of turning the Wallabies into the number one team in the world rankings, and winning a Webb Ellis trophy in Rugby World Cup 2019.

But this is something that is easier said than done. That is my point.

The history of teams defeated in a Rugby World Cup final does not make pleasant reading for Wallabies supporters.

France, defeated finalist in Rugby World Cup 2011 by one point, were thrashed by a record score in the quarter-final of Rugby World Cup 2015 by the same opponents, the All Blacks.

England, the defeated finalist in Rugby World Cup 2007, were bundled out of the Rugby World Cup 2011 in the quarter-final.

Australia, the defeated finalist in Rugby World Cup 2003, were out of Rugby World Cup 2007 in the quarter-final.

France, the defeated finalist in Rugby World Cup 1999, were out of the Rugby World Cup 2003 in the semi-final.

New Zealand, the defeated finalist in Rugby World Cup 1995, were out of Rugby World Cup 1999 in the quarter-final.

England, the defeated finalist in Rugby World Cup 1991, were out of the Rugby World Cup 1995 in the semi-final.

France, the defeated finalist in Rugby World Cup 1987, were out of the Rugby World Cup 1991 in the quarter-final.

Cheika’s challenge with the Wallabies in Rugby World Cup 2019 is somehow to defeat the ‘Curse Of The Defeated Rugby World Cup Finalist’. No defeated finalist has even made the next final, let alone won it.

It is perhaps churlish to note, then, in the context of Coach of the Year that the first winner of a Rugby World Cup final to go on and win the next final were the 2015 All Blacks coached by Steve Hansen.