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The ARU has made the right decision to appoint Ewen McKenzie as the new Wallaby coach. He is immediately available and, perhaps most importantly, he is the most qualified Australian available to coach the Wallabies.
This last point is extremely important. Deans was never accepted by a significant group of Australian powerbrokers because of two factors: first, he was appointed when John O’Neill held sway at the ARU as a dominating CEO. And second, because he was not an Australian.
The O’Neill factor was poisonous at time as his detractors and enemies moved seamlessly from attacks on him to attacks on Deans. These attacks mounted in intensity and nastiness after Deans was given a further two years as Wallaby coach before the 2011 RWC tournament.
All these various streams of hostility from different interest groups joined together to become a flood of never-ending criticism that reached its peak with Greg Martin’s astonishing and nasty accusation that Deans was some sort of Trojan Horse from New Zealand to undermine Australian rugby.
The sheer venom and stupidity of this comment made it essential that the successor to Deans had to be an Australian, even if he was not the strongest candidate for the job.
And this is what has happened. There was strong support for Jake White, the Springboks coach in their RWC 2007 triumph, notably from Brendan Cannon in The Sunday Telegraph. But this was never on the cards.
McKenzie is a former Wallaby, an assistant coach during the wonderful Rod Macqueen era and the Reds coach when they won their first (and only) Super Rugby tournament.
He was effectively sacked or not renewed as coach of the Waratahs despite the fact that he got them into the finals in 2005 and 2008. And he was sacked as coach of Stade Francais.
However, being sacked is part of the life history of rugby coaches, and coaches in all the major professional sports.
He transformed the Reds franchise from a motley mob that lost most of their matches before small and dwindling crowds to an exciting team that draws big crowds, has won a Super Rugby tournament and is in the running to do so again this year (perhaps) and consistently defeats New Zealand sides.
This last consideration was an important factor in his elevation to the Wallaby coaching job. The great blot on Deans’ record was the inability of his teams to defeat the All Blacks. In the 18 Tests against them in his tenure, the Wallabies won three.
And one of those wins was the very first time he coached him against the All Blacks, which was a massive victory at Sydney that augured (but was unfulfilled) a new period of dominance to match that achieved by Macqueen and his great side.
But it was not to be. The All Blacks, under the beleagured Sir Graham Henry, regrouped for the Eden Park return Test and won just as convincingly as the Wallabies had won at Sydney. Henry concedes now that the ultimate success of the All Blacks in RWC 2011 and his continued tenure as coach really rode on that Eden Park result.
Aside from the lack of success or only occasional success against the All Blacks, Deans racked up a reasonably strong coaching record.
The Deans record for the Wallabies is: 58 per cent wins in 74 Tests: 3 wins out of 18 against the All Blacks: 9 wins out of 14 against the Springboks: 5 wins out of 6 against France: 8 wins out of 9 against Wales: 4 wins out of 6 against England: 71.4 per cent of wins against all nations except New Zealand (16.6 per cent).
He, along with Macqueen, is the only Wallaby coach in the professional era to win the Tri-Nations Cup.
His Wallabies had a strong winning record against the Springboks, with the win at Blomfontein in 2010 with Kurtley Beale’s last second successful penalty from the halfway sideline being the first Wallaby win at altitude for 40 years.
And in the RWC 2011 tournament the Wallabies defeated the Springboks in the quarter finals. The third finish in the tournament was one the Wallabies strongest performances, although well short of the wins in 1991 and 1999.
There has been a strong campaign for McKenzie for several years. This campaign has come, mainly from Queensland, with the leading Queensland rugby writers, Queensland administrators and Queensland former Wallabies leading the charge.
The campaign has been successful. McKenzie has the job. He is no longer the Queensland candidate for the Wallaby job, he is the Australian coach and the Australian rugby community, all sections of it, need to get behind him and give him the support that was never given Deans.
Somehow he has to present a Wallaby side that can match the All Blacks on August 17 at ANZ Stadium, the ground where against the British and Irish Lions the Wallabies played their worst Test in years.