Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size Ahead of the Australia Day long weekend last year, Raelene Castle and Michael Cheika sat in a restaurant in The Rocks with the chief executive of another national union. They drained a couple of bottles of red over dinner and talked. The mood was convivial. Castle was only new in the job, the first woman in charge of a major sporting code in Australia. ‘‘The relationship between the CEO and the coach is incredibly important,’’ Castle had told media about 10 days earlier, on her first day in the office. ‘‘It’s about making sure that we find an engagement that works really well and that we can help each other and work closely together.’’ Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video Fast forward 20 months, to Castle and Cheika arguing in front of dozens of guests at the Australian Embassy in Tokyo. A heated row, only stopped when another guest, former Wallaby Morgan Turinui, stepped in and told them – Australian rugby’s two highest-profile figureheads – to compose themselves. On the field, the Wallabies’ World Cup campaign was unravelling. While Castle and Cheika were sipping drinks on the embassy lawn, Wallabies winger Reece Hodge was three kilometres away in the 12th-floor offices of law firm Atsumi Sakai Janssen, fronting a judicial committee over a dangerous tackle. At some point during the function Cheika and Castle would have found out the committee had handed Hodge a three-week ban. He was going to miss Australia’s crucial pool match against Wales in three days’ time. Cheika was furious. But the unedifying blow-up was not simply a bubbling over of simmering World Cup tensions. When Cheika let the cat out of the bag the day he resigned – ‘‘I have no relationship with the CEO’’ – rugby insiders wondered if it was ever going to end a different way.


Ask anyone who has managed Cheika. The best method or, at least, the only workable one? Get out of his way. That worked at NSW Rugby when the returning Randwick No.8 took the Waratahs’ abundant talent and turned them into Super Rugby title winners in two seasons. Jason Allen, chief executive at the time, and chairman Roger Davis got out of the super coach’s way. That doesn’t work, however, when the win rate falls to 48 per cent and the post-match media conferences become an assortment of petulant complaints and personal jibes. Cheika was good when the Wallabies won but, when they lost, his efforts to shield the players from scrutiny with a controversial comment wore thin. The relationship between Michael Cheika and Raelene Castle was non-existent by the time the coach fell on his sword. Credit:AP Castle had to do something last year, when the numbers were grim. Four wins and nine losses from 13 Tests for a 32 per cent win rate. A dismal year on the back of 2017 (64 per cent) and 2016 (40 per cent), and a nightmare run-in to a World Cup. She and the board, working closely with high-performance boss Ben Whitaker, had three choices. Sack Cheika and replace him with a world-class coach. Sack Cheika and replace him with an interim coach. Or stick with Cheika and bring forward the structural reforms slated for the post-2019 era. On the first scenario, board and management sources inside Rugby Australia insisted at the time and now that there were no world-class coaches available at the end of last year. That bears scrutiny, given the cyclical nature of coaching movements built around Rugby World Cups. The second scenario was always possible. Former Wallabies assistant coach Scott Johnson was being brought home for a newly created director of rugby role – the sort of catch-all high performance overlord role that requires a highly skilled operator with deep and extensive experience. Johnson coached Scotland on an interim basis before putting on the director of rugby hat up there and could have filled the role here again.


Former Wallabies coach John Connolly would have stepped into the breach. The Brumbies’ Dan McKellar, a highly rated domestic candidate, could have been drafted in. But the downsides in both those scenarios were twofold. First there was the cost factor. Cheika was on a base salary of $1.2 million a season. A figure commensurate with the coaches of other tier-one rugby nations, it was not a payout price officials thought was worth the risk. Loading Second was the player factor. Cheika’s great strength was his ability to inspire devotion inside the dressing room. After six years in the Australian system, first with the Waratahs and then with the Wallabies, Cheika had his detractors. The players who had fallen foul of the national coach’s necessary self-interest. The ones cast aside before the 2015 World Cup, the ones auditioned and rejected in 2016 and 2017, and the ones old enough to know one man never has all the answers. But there was always, until the bitter end last week, a large group who threw in their chips with Cheika. Not just the Class of '14 Waratahs – Michael Hooper, Kurtley Beale, Sekope Kepu, Tolu Latu and Adam Ashley-Cooper – but also the young players he had brought through. SMH Live: 2019 Year in Review As the year comes to a close, join Georgina Robinson and other award-winning journalists as they reflect on the biggest stories of 2019 and look ahead to 2020. Book early to secure your seat. They included Queensland youngsters Lukhan Salakaia-Loto and Izack Rodda, who both lost their fathers over the past two years and were helped by Cheika’s empathic approach to coaching, as well as young forwards Allan Alaalatoa, Taniela Tupou, Jordan Uelese, Isi Naisarani, and backs Reece Hodge, Marika Koroibete and Dane Haylett-Petty. All were handed their debuts by Cheika as he tried to build momentum leading into the World Cup.


‘‘It takes [the heat] off us, he is putting himself out there to be shot,’’ Salakaia-Loto said. ‘‘He’s protecting us as every good coach would do and [is] not going to let your players hang out to dry. We’d all do the same for each other.’’ That kind of talk helped buy Cheika a stay of execution. Castle and the board did not want to run the risk of saddling his replacement with a dressing-room stewing over the departure of their devoted godfather figure. Loading But underlying it all was the unmistakable smell of fear. Fear of what a sacked Cheika might say, or do, if the board took the hard road and said enough was enough. Johnson was installed instead, Cheika was given a panel of selectors and, for the first time, had to operate with some constraints. Castle was tough on her coach when necessary. Cheika wanted to take the team back to the University of Notre Dame for their World Cup training camp, as he had in 2015. Castle said no and handed him a budget worth half the cost of sending the squad to the United States. The Wallabies ran hills in Noumea instead. She pushed back during the World Cup when Cheika tried to get his players out of some of the off-field, commercial and media engagements that always clutter a Test team’s schedule. The embassy party was one such function. It ended in tears, literally. Three weeks later, with a 40-16 quarter-final drubbing at the hands of England, so did the four-yearly hopes of Wallabies fans.


‘‘I know we are all feeling a little down right now but I believe that the game of rugby in Australia is a diamond that has been left unworn, and that some don’t think sparkles enough to be worn at the big dance,’’ Cheika wrote this week on the website Athletes Voice. ‘‘It simply needs to be polished so it can sparkle from under-6s right through to the golden oldies, for those who love the game, by those that love the game.’’ By those who love the game. Cheika’s final dig at his chief executive and a board he believes isn’t close enough to rugby to understand the precious gem with which they’ve been entrusted. Lukhan Salakaia-Loto was among several players fiercely loyal to Cheika. Credit:Getty Castle will survive this fiasco. Cheika wasn’t her coach and the board that voted to appoint her over rival Phil Kearns – with John Eales abstaining on the grounds of their friendship – is largely intact.

But there are big, scary tests on the horizon that will require leadership, vision and – the kicker – courage. Fox Sports will buy the broadcast rights to Super Rugby and the Rugby Championship again, with a deal to be announced in coming weeks, but there is a growing feeling Super Rugby will be as poorly watched as the A-League if someone doesn’t, in George Gregan’s words last week, ‘‘break the wheel’’. Loading ‘‘I think it has been a very challenging time. We looked very long and hard at the end of last year at what we felt we needed to put in place and that’s not just about the Wallabies head coach,’’ Castle said the night before Cheika resigned. ‘‘That’s about putting a high performance plan in place that allows growth and development of our U16s, U18s, right up to our Wallabies. ‘‘The integration of the Super Rugby franchises into the Wallabies up and down and working much more closely together is the system that we need. So there have been some changes already. Those changes will put us in a much stronger places moving into the next four years.’’

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