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12 years, 6 months and 20 days ago, or thereabouts, a young(er) Eddie Jones watched nervously from the coaches’ box above Sydney’s Telstra Stadium. Or perhaps it was the sidelines (who remembers these things?).
His troops, the Australian Wallabies, were locked in a fierce battle with England, 17 apiece at the 99th of a possible 100 minutes before the end of extra time in the World Cup final.
In the 100th minute, English fly-half Johnny Wilkinson knocked over one of his trademark drop goals and – as it sailed over the back dot and out of play – it took with it any hope of victory for Australia.
And we could debate until the pub runs out of beer whether Eddie Jones or his replacement – the incumbent Michael Cheika – had the tougher campaign, the simple fact is this: As of today, current England coach Eddie Jones and his Wallaby counterpart Michael Cheika’s achievements coaching our national team are exactly on par – second place in the Rugby World Cup.
Eddie Jones’ loss to England in Sydney went down in history as perhaps the closest finish in the history of professional rugby union. However, his achievement came at a cost. Mad-scientist is a painfully overused description of Jones and yet, as accurate as it is today, it was even more so back in 2003.
Jones circa 2003, at the helm of the Wallabies, seemed to cherish finding new and creative ways to give conventional wisdom about coaching rugby the middle finger. It is a deep appreciation of these fundamentals – the unwritten rules of our game – that make the best teams in the world that way. Yet Jones was so damn good that, even back then, he consistently seemed to exceed the potential of a team who arguably never had the talent to get that far in the first place.
An example of a hypothesis that earned the mad scientist his moniker, as recently explained by Roar sage Spiro, was that an 80 minute game of rugby would see players spend only eight minutes packing down in the scrum. On that basis, even specialist players would only be permitted to practice their art for only that many minutes – eight – at training.
Of course, Jones predicted (correctly) that this lack of effort would translate to a need to alter Australia’s approach to the scrum. Enter Al Baxter and Bill Young, two masters of the darkest of the dark arts – the tactical scrum collapse.
Baxter and Young were experts here, twisting and wheeling and slipping binds at every opportunity and then backing their performance with acting that could only have been learned at NIDA – masterfully selling referees the idea that whatever had happened was the other team’s fault.
Another such experiment was playing two specialist open-side flankers in a single team. George Smith and Phil Waugh, in that order, were arguably the best two No.7s in the world at the time. So talented that it could be argued they forced Jones’ hand but either way they would take the field with Smith out of position in the No.6 jersey.
Finally, perhaps the most bizarre and yet successful of Jones’ experiments, three rugby leagues players by the names of Wendell Sailor, Matt Rogers and Lote Tuquiri held spots in Australia’s starting 15. Each of the converts found a success in union that exceeds anyone before or since (with one notable exception), and yet it still seemed bizarre to see them make up the back three of an Australian rugby union team. But so it was.
And this symphony of counter-intuitive decisions, which, by my count, changed seven of the 15 positions on the field, would fall on the genius side of that blurry line shared with insanity – taking us to within seconds of winning the sport’s biggest prize.
However, the results would ultimately prove to be short lived and Jones’ experiments, with the passage of time, would come to be known as nothing more than a series of Faustian bargains which significantly hurt the long-term viability of the team.
The (then) IRB clamped down on the kind of deception at scrum time that made Baxter and Young top-shelf. The two-openside strategy never quite seemed to work. And one by one the Leaguies would either get lengthy bans for having the wrong kind of white line fever, or would go back to the NRL. Or both.
Australia’s national team was left in complete disarray, leading to one of the longest dark periods in a proud rugby history. Our backline took years to rebuild and our scrum never quite recovered.
And so, while Eddie Jones took us closer to winning the World Cup than any man since the great Bob Dwyer, make no mistake. He is the bad guy in this epic. To be clear, by all accounts he is not a bad guy. But he is the bad guy.
Blinded by ego, fueled by genius and perhaps ignorant to the long-term implications, Eddie Jones’ régime sent us into a tailspin that was so bad it lasted for the next 13 years. Ultimately, it would drag us down to a record low of sixth in the world rankings.
With off-field scandals seemingly a constant feature of the team, and the notoriously political ARU focusing its efforts on sending the game broke rather than developing players – it would take a miracle. In 2014, we got one.
Our miracle came in the form of an enigmatic, oddly evasive and slightly chubby former teammate of Eddie Jones – our national coach Michael Cheika.
And while he might not be much to look at, Cheika was the perfect mix of old-school, technical and dedicated to bring our boys together. Properly. Better still, this mystery coach appears to have done very well for himself (in fashion, if you believe it) meaning that he was in the job for love rather than money – making him the perfect person to ignore the ARU comprehensively and focus on the rugby.
What Cheika did in a short space of time, as Head Coach of Australia’s two most successful rugby teams simultaneously, was nothing short of miraculous. He not only took us to the final, but he did it playing a style of rugby that reignited a long dormant passion in Australia’s “kinda-rugby” public.
To quote Andrew Logan, in my opinion the best rugby writer in Australia today, “This is what you Wallabies have done. Can you believe it? You’ve pulled Australian rugby together again. God knows it hasn’t been that way for a while, and all we needed was something to follow. Well, you’ve given us that alright.”
But since then, a few fans who suffer particularly badly under the weight of the post-traumatic stress of the past few years have found ourselves wondering – was Cheika’s success negotiated with the devil like that of Jones before him?
Think about it. Not only has Cheika gained a bit of a reputation for shipping in players (think Ta’avo, Potgieter, Naiyaravoro) but he too broke the unwritten laws of coaching by having two No.7 specialists in his starting side for the World Cup. That’s to say nothing of the fact that he arranged for rules about using players not signed to an Australian club overturned by way of “Giteau’s Law” just so he could fly in a some veterans for the World Cup.
But Cheika is not Jones circa 2003. He understands the unwritten laws of rugby, he understands that there are some thing that just work in all teams – and is perhaps better than anyone alive at finding the right player for the job.
Need to fix the Australian scrum? Bring in a hardheaded, veteran Argentinian hooker as your scrum coach and have him (literally) poke your forwards with a stick until they get it through their head that they need to square up, and work together.
Waratahs’ back-line lacking punch? Find yourself a 123kg Fijian wrecking ball as your winger and have him play the position “Lomu-style.”
Forward pack coming up short in the mongrel stakes? That’s easy! Find a big angry South African lock who doesn’t seem to understand there’s a rugby game going on around the brawl that he’s creating and get him on the field. And when he’s not eligible to play at national level give Kane Douglas a call – he always seemed to walk off the field covered in blood. That’s a good sign, right?
Cheika, indeed, inked Lucifer’s contract like Jones before him to (nearly) find glory at the World Cup but now, in his first full four year cycle, he has correctly thrown that baby out with the bathwater and started fresh – picking both experienced and developing talent locally in the first instance with only the obvious problem spaces of tighthead prop and “why the hell did they pick him” to be filled by Sekope Kepu and James Horwill respectively.
It should give us great confidence that, heading into a three match series with England, we have the right man in charge.
But the resurgence of Australian rugby is but a burgeoning miracle. The most crowded sporting market in the world makes coupled with a decade of heartache has made Australian Rugby fans fickle creatures and I wonder, should we not topple the old foe this time around, just how much of that miracle will stick.
Make no mistake. This series matters – it might even make or break the future identity of Australian rugby. After all, you don’t get a new miracle every other week.
What this means is that having hurt Australian rugby in a way we thought it may never recover from, the smarter and vastly more experienced version of Eddie Jones – the 2016 model – is coming out 13 years after leading us down the good-intention paved road to hell to put the final nail in a coffin he started putting the lid on all that time ago.
Except this time Jones hasn’t sacrificed the scrum, he hasn’t brought in too many code-hoppers and perhaps most frightening of all – he has just taken his team, who have spent far more time together this year than the Wallabies – to an undefeated Six Nations title. Now he’s here, and he’s at his best.
For all the confidence in our media, we need to remember too that this is the man who coached Japan to a historic victory over the mighty Springboks of South Africa just last year. A coach who can do that, can do just about anything.
And so it has come to this, Bob Dwyer’s two greatest (coaching) disciples, the former teammates are going to square up to win the title of “Architect of Australia’s Rugby Identity” – one as the man who saved it, the other as the destroyer.
Whatever the outcome, only one thing is sure – it should make for some bloody good rugby. Enjoy it!
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.