In a brief, anonymous club rugby career that may be likened to hospital food – sub-standard and not enough of it – your correspondent achieved the distinction of being thrashed by two future Wallaby coaches.

Ewen McKenzie had our scrum seeing triple. As an unknown boy-mountain just off the plane from Melbourne (he must have needed three seats), McKenzie managed to pop not only our tight-head prop opposing him, but also our hooker and our loose-head. He was an entire front row, so destroying our scrum that his own hooker, then a very slim Phil Kearns, could dash around like an extra flanker. It didn't seem fair.

Big job ahead: New Wallabies coach Michael Cheika. Credit:Getty Images

Michael Cheika was a player who made your heart sink as soon as you saw him warming up in the Randwick colours. In anticipation of playing Cheika, your eyes shrank into their sockets and your testicles beat a swift tactical retreat into your abdomen. You were not thinking of practising your moves so much as clearing your lines of communication to the carrier of the magic water bottle. You knew you were in for a deeply unpleasant experience. Someone said, "Oh jeez, I hate playing that guy." It was the highest compliment you could pay.

With his woolly black hair, whining voice and attitude of termination with extreme prejudice, Cheika was not only a very good player in a great club, but the natural heir to that permanent Randwick back-row menace, John Maxwell. But whereas Maxwell could inspire a loosening in the bowels purely through the stories of his four-knuckled "welcome to rugby", Cheika was more of a thinking man's thug.