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The weekend slaughter of the Melbourne Rebels at the hands of the Cheetahs may seem only a fair and logical fate for a team in their first year. Things surely could never have been otherwise.
All blame must simply be laid on circumstances, for summoning a good playing group and generating team familiarity take considerable time.
But is it inevitable that a team in their first year should be battered from pillar to post and end the season as something approaching a laughing stock?
In a report of the previous obliteration courtesy of the under-performing Bulls, Greg Growden observed ‘It is clear that without Danny Cipriani the Rebels are bereft of midfield ideas.’
The Rebels have lost six matches since Macqueen dismissed Cipriani in order to assert his team’s ‘culture’, and impress his dominance on the young man, the most recent a horrifying dismemberment considering the calibre of opposition.
Everyone had high hopes for the tenure of Rod Macqueen at the helm of a new franchise.
Highly successful in his previous career at the beginning of the decade, it was expected that even after a decade out of the game the great man’s magic touch might still be wielded with the old aplomb.
However, as the hideous descent down the Super table accelerates and the reasons for the first time come under examination, it is ever more clear that one overriding cause lies at the root: Macqueen’s colossal, ballooning ego.
This is often the problem with coaches who have enjoyed significant triumphs in earlier incarnations. Unblemished reputations breed fantastical ideas of their own infallibility and the notion that their every word possesses the truth of revelation and that the world should be eager to listen, however often such pronouncements are given. Bob Dwyer is another case of this.
A man like Macqueen begins to conceive his powers as capable of transforming base metal into gold, unaware perhaps that his earlier results were based on a strong playing group as well as good coaching, and to delightedly relish the prospect of parading his greatness to a younger generation.
This cosmic distance between Macqueen’s conception of himself and reality is exacerbated by another factor: he is in essence a product of the amateur era of playing and coaching.
Most of the players he led began their careers as amateurs and thought in this mould, and yet he is now trying to apply the principles of success from this era to a professional world with utterly different patterns of behaviour and players formed with a new psychology.
This dislocation from professionalism was inherent in his first meeting with the Rebels’ board of directors.
Explaining his philosophy of a successful team to them as if they were children, he proudly wrote a gigantic ‘C’ on the board, and explained that a team’s flourishing depended entirely on ‘Culture’, a word that begins with ‘C’ he would have them know.
This could well be true, but in the amateur era when playing rugby was a personal commitment rather than a career, motivation was far more the sole determinant of success than now.
Obviously a team’s culture is important, but the ‘decent gentleman will prevail’ code Macqueen was reared in has been hardened and transformed by a more ruthless state of affairs where players know their own value, consider rugby a career rather than a moral cause, and find their motivation in a broader variety of factors.
The grand old general’s misguided delusions were evident from the recruiting phase of the campaign last year.
The team was at different times linked with Israel Folau, Greg Inglis, Billy Slater, Manu Vatuvei and Frank Pritchard. Macqueen’s amateurish incompetence and failure to recognise that a modern player when negotiating a contract is making a cold, rational career choice rather than choosing a regiment to fight for led to none of them being signed.
It is the fiasco of the failed Folau signing that holds the key. Macqueen elected to give him as long as he desired to sign, assuming that as he had indicated he would join the Rebels and was a gentleman who had been vetted for inhabiting the correct ‘culture’. Folau would never do anything as vile as choose another job simply because it paid three times as much.
In Macqueen’s amateur paradise, money is simply not a factor in chosing a rugby team, for it is not a career that is being discussed. ‘Culture’ is all that would define a man’s reasons for moving to one team over another.
That Israel Folau might consider sport a career or come from a background less comfortable than the Rockefeller heirs, and perhaps even have others depending on him did not of course penetrate the ivory tower of Macqueen’s thinking. Here is where, for gentlemen and patriots, rugby is a kind of merry jousting competition as far removed from real life concerns and the vulgarity of money as could be.
Not that losing Folau or recruiting, with notable exceptions, a vastly understrength team, would have troubled Macqueen in the slightest.
Rather it gave him a gilded chance to manifest his genius by the mystical transformation of this dirty dozen into a championship winning band of knights flying the Macqueen cultural flag, for all to see.
The returning general would set the world to rights and be praised and lauded to the skies.
This gleaming opportunity must allow its prophet to wing in and out of course so as not to drain or waste his gifts with exhaustion in the slightest.
The long-term commitment to a team of most professional coaches is not his way: ‘I am not a career coach’ he declares, and anticipates to departing the scene in two years having shown all the world what real greatness is with truly graceful effortless.
Danny Cipriani cannot stand in his way. A professional player aware of his value, reluctant to submit to a perverse authority who moved to to Melbourne in the first place to escape another amateur relic in England: he should of course be treated with yet more tough authority and made to prostrate himself before his great coach.
This will set him to rights. No other form of management is possible. If he fails in defence he must be punished and any losses blamed on him.
Ewen Mckenzie’s understanding of a young professional in his willingness to overlook Quade Cooper’s indiscretions and defensive frailities, trusting that when given support and confidence the young man would mature in both areas, is a terrible approach with disastrous results in the eyes of Macqueen, because it betrays and spirit of hierarchy and rugby ethics. The order of the universe might be upturned and anarchy return.
It is important to understand the recent fiasco with Cipriani: Cipriani felt that he had been made a scapegoat for the team’s failings when dropped from the squad and with the immediate signing of Kurtley Beale, designed specifically to replace him.
So his disobeying of team regulations was an entirely rebellious a message to Macqueen that if he was to be blamed for everything the team did wrong and undermined by the breathless acquisition of a player to replace him, he was fed up. Rightly so. His earlier affair with the bottle was wrong, this time however he was correct.
Yet Macqueen’s tough tactics have misfired. He fearfully underestimated the contribution Cipriani had been making to the side, his creativity at the heart of every victory and the entire attacking force of the team. The recent pummellings have made this fully clear.
Macqueen, to assert the power of his personality, has wantonly thrown away six matches and crippled the franchise, now lying 14th in the table, when with Cipriani in full swing there was once talk of making the play-offs.
Yet no one will dream to utter a word against the mythical figure, for he is a great of the game and cannot in any way be responsible for any problem or failure with his team.
The discord that provoking a team to vote one of their own number off a tour will sow is also returning to haunt him and is another factor in the flat, disheartened performances in South Africa. No healthy team wishes to lynch one of its organs, and even those who voted for it will have done so with an unclean conscience.
Having Macqueen’s ‘Culture’ psycho-babble stuffed down their throats twenty-four hours a day may have won them over temporarily, and they surely fear their boss, but the presence of guilt will weigh more and more on minds as time passes.
Now this is not to write off Macqueen for good. A case of authority gone mad, if he can learn to be a professional coach, the subtle new laws of psychology that apply and the accompanying differences in player management, then things may all be well next year.
Indeed, if he could only stop trying to pulverise Cipriani beneath his thumb he might find that Kurtley Beale at 15 and Cipriani at 10 a formidable combination.
For now however, the alchemist has broken his wand and his reputation is in danger of cracking and falling to pieces as well. The great old lord of Australian rugby must humble himself and learn the new rules of a changed world and fast, or he may find that the legend of Rod Macqueen’s greatness is a story from the distant past.
Join The Roar rugby editor Christy Doran, former Wallaby Matt Toomua and a cast of regular and special guests as they look at the biggest issues in the game on The Roar Rugby Podcast. If you’re looking for great odds on the next game check out Aussie bookmaker PlayUp. Chances are you’re about to lose. Set a deposit limit.