In face but Cheika won’t be clowning around
I love that stuff, I love being in the firing line. We’re Australia, they’re New Zealand. I don’t expect them to like me.
haven’t held the Bledisloe Cup since 2003.
His ambivalence towards Hansen is relatively well known and reiterated recently in a podcast with Australian rugby journalists Jamie Pandaram and Iain Payten. It is clear that instilling self-belief into a team drawn from players who have known nothing but failure against New Zealand opposition this year will be his priority.
In the podcast, Cheika didn’t deny that relations between the two teams were frosty, and he also paid credit to the way Lions coach Warren Gatland reacted to being portrayed as a clown in a cartoon published by the Herald.
Cheika was similarly illustrated by the Herald last year, something that, bizarrely, he blamed on the All Blacks after the third test at Eden Park in October.
“I would say that’s pretty accurate, we’re competing against each other, it’s not like we’re going to be best mates,” Cheika said of the teams’ dislike of each other. “I don’t think it would be normal to be any other way.”
Of the Gatland treatment, he said: “I thought Gatland handled that brilliantly. — NZN
“It’s good fun, don’t get me wrong. I really enjoy that conflict and that challenge.
“It would be much easier for us, because we’ve been beaten for many years now for Bledisloe, to cower away and go ‘ Well we shouldn’t say anything or we should be all rosy behind the scenes because we don’t have the right to stand up because we’ve been getting beaten’.
“But I don’t believe that. We’ve got to do our absolute best and be fully accountable for everything that happens on the field but that doesn’t mean we can’t stand up for ourselves as well.
“I love that stuff, I love being in the firing line.
“We’re Australia, they’re New Zealand. I don’t expect them to like me.”
Next week is unlikely to be dull.