SPIRO: Michael Cheika needs to leave the Waratahs now

This is a hard call but events on and off the rugby field in the last few days have made it clear that Michael Cheika needs to leave the Waratahs now and start full-time coaching and selecting the Wallabies.

I was a firm believer before the season started that Cheika could successfully coach the Waratahs through the 2015 Super Rugby season, and then transform himself comfortably and successfully into the coach of the Wallabies in their journey to become the first national side to win three Rugby World Cup tournaments.

The first three-time winner gets to keep the original Webb Ellis trohpy. The Springboks and the All Blacks are two-time winners as well. So it would be a mighty achievement by the Wallabies to become the first team to win three.

Part of the justification for Cheika to combine the Waratahs and Wallabies jobs this season (at least as far as I was concerned) was that the core of the Wallabies was in the Waratahs squad. By coaching the Waratahs, Cheika was in effect coaching the Wallabies.

This argument presumed, too, that the Waratahs would be as dominant and dynamic as they were in the last half of the 2014 season.

It also presumed that the Australian Super Rugby teams would, as a group, be much stronger than they were last season. This presumption was rather famously endorsed by the boast of the ARU’s chief executive Bill Pulver at the start of the season that the Australian Conference would provide three teams in the 2015 Super Rugby finals.

All the conferences get one team in the finals, the side that tops the points count in that conference. Then the rest of the three spots go to the teams that have accumulated the most number of points.

After nine rounds, though, the virtual halfway point of the tournament round robin, it is becoming obvious that having three teams from the Australian Conference is a fantasy. There is a distinct possibility that there will be only one Australian side in the finals.

And that side will be the winner of the Australian Conference, either the Brumbies or the Waratahs.

The top six sides in order of points are: Hurricanes 31, Chiefs 28, Brumbies 25, Bulls 24, Highlanders, Stormers 22.

There are four other teams, two from the South African Conference (Lions 21, Sharks 20) and one from the New Zealand Conference (Crusaders 20) and one from the Australian Conference (Waratahs 18) that have a chance of being finals sides.

The other three Australian sides, the Rebels (15 points), and the two bottom teams, the Force (8 points) and Reds (7 points), haven’t a hope in hell of making the finals.

The irony here is that the Reds actually looked a likely side against the Bulls. They scored four tries, something that few teams can achieve at Pretoria. After 50 minutes, the scoreline was Bulls 24-17 Reds, with the visitors finishing strongly.

Two decisions by the South Africa referee Jaco Peyper took the steam out of the Reds attack. First, Adam Thomson was given a yellow card for ‘cynically’ pulling down a maul.

It seemed to me that this was extremely harsh on Thomson. As the maul went down, you could hear calls of “good stuff, Thomo” from his fellow forwards. They were praising his efforts to keep the ball off the ground as the maul, lurching forward like a damaged tank, fell to the ground. Rather than trying to pull the maul down, Thomson was trying to keep it up.

With Thomson in the sin bin, the Bulls went for another rolling maul from the lineout. Planet Rugby describes what happened next: “From the ensuing phase, prop Marcel van der Merwe was adjudged by the referee and TMO to have scored without the use of a double movement. It was a contentious decision… ”

What I saw from the many replays, and this is what the South African commentators saw too, was a clear double movement and a not so clear actual grounding. James Hanson, the Reds hooker, looked to have had his arm under the ball thereby preventing the grounding.

The Brumbies had their chance to beat the Blues at Eden Park at the start of the weekend’s matches. Nic White had a shot at goal from about halfway and fell short with his effort. To put the loss into a context, the Blues were the bottom side in the tournament and the Brumbies were the top Australian side.

Moreover, the Blues played nervously, as you would expect from a side that lost its first seven matches in Super Rugby 2015. Despite this, the Brumbies succumbed to the Eden Park hoodoo and failed to defeat a side that played, in the second half particularly, as if expecting to be defeated.

It was noticeable with all the Australian sides that they don’t have much of a counter-attack game to break up play and to get around and through the massive front lines of defence that all the sides are putting out as road blocks.

I watched the Waratahs-Stormers game near the try line at the Paddington end of Allianz Stadium, about a few rows from the playing field. We (son Zac and his daughters Evie and Isla) virtually had the massive Fijian Taqele Naiyaravoro charging straight at us as he scored a tremendous try, knocking over three defenders in the process.

Up so close to the action, it was clear that the Waratahs were losing many of the contacts. They smashed and smashed into the defence rather like the little boy who when asked why he kept on hitting his head against a brick wall replied: ‘Because it feels good when I stop’.

There didn’t seem to be any ideas from the Waratahs to break down the brick wall, except for vainly trying to smash it down. The pace, accuracy and flair of 2014 seemed to be lost.

Georgina Robinson, in her report of the match for The Sun-Herald, made the point that “large parts of the Waratahs’ play were sorely lacking polish”.

She also pointed to next weekend with the Waratahs flying to Wellington to face the Hurricanes where “Cheika is sure to face questions about the SANZAR investigation and his grasp of the laws of the game”.

The poor form of the Australian Conference sides, including the Waratahs, means that Cheika needs to spend all his time – full-time in other words – with the Wallabies. Right now.

This round of losses by all the Australian sides to overseas sides, a disastrous pattern in 2015, confirmed that the Wallabies job is going to be much harder than anyone envisaged when the season started with such high hopes.

Cheika needs to be full-time because it is clear that very many positions in the Wallabies are open to new talent as the old champions begin to show their age. Take the second row, for instance. The standout Australian player in this position at the weekend was the Western Force giant Adam Coleman.

But with all the detail and work involved in trying to get the Waratahs up to their level of last season, does Cheika have the time to pour over the statistics of all the Australian players, in every position, every week, as his counterparts with the Springboks and All Blacks are doing?

The answer is obvious. He does not have the time. But if he leaves this essential work too much longer, it will escape his attention in the rush of trying to get the Wallabies prepared when the Super Rugby season ends.

Daryl Gibson has been named head coach of the Waratahs for next season. Why not start him off now and allow Cheika to move on to his Wallabies responsibilities?

There is another consideration with Cheika remaining with the Waratahs until the end of the season which Georgina Robinson hinted at, namely that his action in going to the officials room at half-time during the Waratahs-Blues match and talking to the referee, Jaco Peyper, is being regarded in New Zealand, by officials and the media, as ‘cheating.’

In my opinion, this is correct. The fact that SANZAR cleared Cheika and the curious arguments used to do so has created the potential for a deeper inquiry into the incident. I am sure that a deeper inquiry would find that Cheika had breached the ARU’s Code of Conduct.

If this sort of finding is made against Cheika then he would be automatically out of his Wallaby job because of a prior violation of the Code of Conduct for which he was given a suspended sentence.

If Cheika moves away from the Waratahs, he moves away from the possibility of losing the Wallabies job. I should state here that I regard Cheika as being absolutely essential to the cause of the Wallabies in their quest for Rugby World Cup glory.

Cheika got a strong sense of what the rugby writers are going to be asking him about when he is in New Zealand when, after the Waratahs loss to the Stormers, he was asked questions about the SANZAR inquiry into the dressing room incident.

It has to be said, Cheika did not handle the questions (which came from reporters supportive of him) very well. The New Zealand reaction, he suggested, was because “I’m not liked over there or not respected”.

But this is a (deliberate?) misinterpretation of what New Zealand rugby people are saying. The criticism is not about Cheika as a person, it focuses on his actions and SANZAR’s misleading judgment of them.

The well respected Chiefs coach Dave Rennie said he was dismayed at Cheika’s conduct and at the “leniency” shown by SANZAR in deeming that Cheika had broken a law of the game but not breached the Code of Conduct by approaching Jaco Peyper in the officials room to seek a clarification of a scrum ruling.

As Rennie told reporters: “I’m really shocked to be honest because it’s opened up a can of worms. I think SANZAR would be smarter to say ‘you can’t talk to the referee at half-time. If you want to talk to the referee, you’ve got to go through your captain’”.

The New Zealand Herald‘s Gregor Paul, the reporter who broke the story and forced SANZAR to actually acknowledge that Cheika had been investigated over the incident, has accused Cheika of cheating and giving SANZAR misinformation.

“The Waratahs laughably claim that their title-winning coach who has worked around the world, didn’t actually know he wasn’t allowed to use the half-time break to knock on the referee’s door and make polite inquiries,” Paul wrote.

The SANZAR investigation noted that “a polite exchange” had taken place between Peyper and Cheika in the officials room. Both of them “have subsequently acknowledged this exchange should not have taken place and apologised”.

Moreover, “there is no evidence that the referee was influenced by the exchange in his handling of the match, nor in the circumstances has there been a breach of the SANZAR Code of Conduct and no further action will be taken”.

Well, Gregor Paul claims that the Blues have video evidence that suggests different decisions from the referee in the second half to those he made in the first half. And there is the matter of an 8-1 penalty count in the first half against the Waratahs turning into a 9-1 count against the Blues.

One of the difficulties in working through all of this is that SANZAR does not seem to publish its Code of Conduct on its site. I couldn’t find it on the site despite many different attempts to get it up. I have been able to find the ARU Code of Conduct (the abbreviated version, though), which presumably is the same as SANZAR’s.

The Code suggests for players and coaches: “Never engage in disrespectful conduct of any sort including profanity … demeaning to other players, officials or supporters.”

By suggesting that Cheika was polite, SANZAR is making the case that he was not disrespectful and therefore no breach of the Code of Conduct because there was no profanity used towards Peyper.

To me, this is like suggesting that no assault took place because the assailant used gloves and, therefore, did not have blood on his hands. The disrespectful conduct includes profanity, sledging and so on, and (this is important) “other actions that are demeaning to other players, officials or supporters”.

The fact that the Blues made the complaint to SANZAR against Cheika (we have to presume this because SANZAR did not say in its statement where the complaint came from) suggests that they found the incident itself demeaning.

And Rennie, who was not a party to the incident but has an interest as coach of the Chiefs, also seems to have this viewpoint. The fact that both Cheika and Peyper apologised suggests that they had done something significantly wrong.

Past judgments by SANZAR confirm, too, that someone does not have to use profanity to fall foul of the Code of Conduct. In May 2013, for instance, Graham Henry was deemed to have breached the Code of Conduct with comments he deemed “honest but humorous” about the refereeing of a Blues-Crusaders match.

The Henry comments did not involve any profanity.

There is another part of the Code of Conduct which SANZAR failed to acknowledge that is damning for Cheika: “Honour both the spirit and letter of the competition rules…”

Cheika and Peyper both failed to do this. They had admitted that they broke the competition rules. This is the opposite to honouring the spirit and letter of the competition rules. SANZAR should have ruled that both Cheika and Peyper, therefore, broke the Code of Conduct.

As I say, Cheika is courting getting suspended from coaching the Wallabies if SANZAR’s ludicrous ruling is allowed to be challenged.

He should get out now and start trying to get the Wallabies campaign into action before it is too late for himself and the Wallabies.