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McKenzie's resignation shows the Wallabies are still toxic

19th October, 2014
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19th October, 2014
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Michael Hooper grabbed his water bottle and bolted from the room. After powering through 190 words, Wallabies coach Ewen McKenzie followed him.

Except he wasn’t the Wallabies coach anymore.

McKenzie ambled by himself down that hallway to, as he put it, “exit stage left” after an all-too-brief 66-second statement.

The irony is, after a couple of weeks of the ARU and Wallabies bungling everything in sight, he actually did exit the room stage left as cued.

McKenzie was alone at the top, without anyone he felt he could turn to for support. This was a case of a chess player, knowing he had no protection available, knocking over the king and getting out.

“You can take it up with Bill.”

All of the boardroom intrigue that inevitably surrounds incidents such as this is still unknown, but I couldn’t help myself. I had to write something.

(By the way, it’s nice to be back after so long. I like what you’ve done with the place while I was out.)

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So what did Bill have to say when we took it up with him? He hammered the media.

“In essence, Ewen said he was going to struggle to retain the level of support he needs from the playing group and, in my view, because of the character assassination he’s suffered in the last two weeks,” Pulver said.

Ewen McKenzie has certainly copped some flack in the media since the Kurtley Beale saga exploded onto centre stage – and it’s clearly been fermenting at least since June. But to say some reporters at Sydney newspapers were the root cause of McKenzie stepping down as coach of the team is an absurdly simplistic view of the situation.

You could mount a successful argument that the media have gone for the most exciting story in some circumstances instead of focusing on the extremely poor – and possibly criminal as Scott Allen detailed – behaviour of Beale.

But that media behaviour doesn’t cause a man like McKenzie to fall on his sword. There’s more to it than that.

Let me just ask a few questions that need to be answered outside of the back-and-forth ‘meeja did this and didn’t do that’ argument.

How often is a bunch text messages at the centre of a disciplinary hearing leaked to the press? I mean, we are getting right up to Peter Slipper/James Ashby craziness when that happens, and at least that was upper-echelon politicking. This is a sporting organisation.

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When the SMSs came out we officially went into what American sportswriter Bill Simmons calls “the Tyson zone”. Which is to say, literally anything could happen after a certain point and you would believe it was true.

When the subject matter of a serious ongoing inquiry ends up being published by the Tele, the organisation as a whole has problems. Once that precedent has been set a coach resigning is suddenly more believable.

Another question: where was Bill Pulver’s strong support of Ewen McKenzie before he had offered his resignation? There hasn’t been much that sounded like unanimous backing of McKenzie coming from St Leonards since this ordeal started.

Suddenly, after McKenzie had walked away, we hear, “Australia has lost a terrific coach and a great bloke. It is extremely disappointing… As somebody who is responsible for upholding the core values of this game – passion, integrity, discipline, respect and solidarity… what has happened to Ewen over the past two weeks is extremely disappointing.”

From the outside, it doesn’t appear as if McKenzie experienced much solidarity from his own ARU employees. Definitely not publicly.

Bigger question: are the ARU going to review Bill Pulver’s tenure after losing two coaches in about 16 months? I don’t say this lightly, because I admire some of the things Pulver has done while in charge of the ARU, not least getting the National Rugby Championship off the ground.

But having two coaches leave on your watch has to raise football-field sized flags.

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Robbie Deans was fired. But let’s not pretend there wasn’t a whole lot of discontent and organisational tension around the end of his time at the Wallabies.

In the wake of the bungling of the Beale/Di Patson thing, Pulver hired a PR manager to help communicate away some of the media focus. Was that the right action to take?

With rugby in the way it currently is in Australia, the last thing the pubic needs from the ARU is more spin or obfuscation.

The best way to clear up the entire mess was to have a review of the Beale indiscretions as quick as possible, internally and maybe publicly clarify and explain Di Patson’s role with the team, and back Ewen McKenzie.

Resolutions, not communications.

Pulver has said that McKenzie was given much more room to operate the Wallabies than Robbie Deans had. Perhaps this was a way of explaining why Pulver hadn’t been more vocal in his support of McKenzie.

What that said to me is two coaches, with two different ways of operating, lost the support of the organisation, team and staff under Pulver’s watch, which ultimately led to their demise.

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Is there any good news for Pulver? Well, here’s what might be the canary in the mine.

September 27 2012, Quade Cooper says on live TV the Wallabies environment is toxic and not conducive to performing well.

(I know: Cooper as the sage warning. Don’t dwell on it; use it more as a literary device if that helps.)

There have obviously been cultural and organisational problems with the ARU for a long time now, and these public flare-ups are just some of the more extreme ways they manifest themselves.

You might not have agreed with Cooper’s mode of communication when he aired that opinion. But there was certainly a cultural issue in the side at the time and has been since then.

We’ve wasted a number of years with a toxic culture, burned through a lot of good players and wasted two talented coaches.

You can’t just shrug at it anymore – if you laughed it off when Cooper brought it up, you can’t do the same while watching McKenzie walk down that hallway.

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It’s been going on too long.

Another absurdly simplistic statement, but a better one than the one I explained at the top: McKenzie resigned because the Wallabies are still a toxic environment.

This is an extremely sad state of affairs for rugby and it will take a more intensive review process and clean-out than blaming the media and public for not being supportive to right the ship.

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