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McKenzie's tough decision will build winning culture

18th November, 2013
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Former Wallabies coach Ewen McKenzie. (AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts)
Roar Guru
18th November, 2013
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It doesn’t really matter whether you agree with Ewen McKenzie on this one or not. If you’re a Wallabies fan, you’ve got to back him to the hilt.

Unless you went to bed early last night and this is the first thing you read when you got up this morning, you’ll be aware that McKenzie has disciplined fifteen members of his squad for boozing on the town in Dublin four nights before the match with Ireland.

Are the penalties harsh? Maybe. Are they called for? Possibly.

Do supporters of the Wallabies have a duty to support McKenzie on this? Absolutely.

McKenzie is four months and ten Tests into his tenure of the top job. On the field and off the field he has been attempting to make changes that have been met with a varying level of success, although most of the news has been bad news.

Granted, Jake White’s sensational exit from Australian rugby amid claims of nationalistic agendas at the ARU headquarters may have intensified the scrutiny on McKenzie’s efforts to transform the Wallabies, but this does not mean that any such scrutiny is premature or unwarranted.

Four wins and six losses in his first ten matches.

Five losses from five matches against the All Blacks and Springboks.

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Australia dropping to fourth on the IRB World Rankings behind England. It’s not good reading, is it?

Snarky commentators from across the ditch have made merry light of the fact that Ewen’s honeymoon has been notably inferior to that of his Kiwi predecessor.

They argue that for all of the supposed enhancement of the team’s culture, the results are going one direction – backwards. Supposedly we need to re-evaluate our priorities.

Nonsense. By focusing on the culture of the team, McKenzie has sensibly put the horse before the cart.

Success is a science. You won’t get the results if you don’t have the conditions.

Now, although the events of the last seven days or so seem to contradict my thinking, I would say that as a general rule it is counter-productive to have your players drunkenly barging around Dublin town four nights before a Test against a top-tier Test nation.

Whether they deserve the break is irrelevant.

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That is a question for the frustratingly mean and greedy ARU executives who draw up the ludicrously crowded rugby calendar.

The only real question for us to ask is ‘what will it take to get us back to being the best Test Rugby nation in the world?’.

Undoubtedly, ‘absolute devotion to the task at hand’ will be indispensable.

Absolute devotion doesn’t necessarily require the players to be angels in every moment of their careers – their privileges and the leeway afforded to them really depend upon the broader context of the performance of the team.

If the team is winning Test matches, if the crowds are turning up to games, if the players are admired, and the trophy cabinet fills – then, yes, the players need not be dealt with too harshly if they decide to make an impromptu expedition to the local watering holes on tour.

Particularly if this has no obvious impact on performance.

However, if the team is not winning matches, if the players are held in suspicion, or if the team does not have (to paraphrase the sacrosanct words of Steve Waugh’s autobiography) players that know their own game and what it takes to win, then, no – some lines have to be drawn that err on the side of rigourousness.

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That does not mean that the players involved should be judged too harshly for their involvement. They slipped up and overstepped the necessarily high standards of the team, there’s no denying that.

But if the events are to be viewed in their proper context, you have to at least credit the players on manning up to their primary responsibility by winning the Test match on the following weekend. That is what they are there for.

Still, some of the names of the players involved and the nature of their reprimands will cause some interest.

There will be some dismay to see senior players like Adam Ashley-Cooper and Benn Robinson as among the guilty parties.

At the other end of the spectrum, the rather amusingly effervescent encomiums for Quade Cooper’s apparent non-involvement have already been forthcoming.

To my mind, however, the incident seems to have been resolved on a positive note.

McKenzie has doled out the appropriate slaps on the wrist, and the senior players involved will hopefully be embarrassed enough by the incident to pull their fingers out and start showing some more leadership on and off the field.

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Because at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter whether the players drink or not. What matters is if they behave like they’re devoted to victory.

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