Renegade Cheika last of the bruisers
Rarely has a coach formed such a glaring study in contrasts as Michael Cheika. While his reputation is often that of a snarling brawler, earned through decades of Vesuvian rages, he can be quite the sophisticate when the mood takes him.
Stay long enough at his press conferences and one hears him veer quite happily into French or Italian, courtesy of his past stints at Stade Francais and Petrarca, or even into the Arabic that he owes to his Lebanese ancestry.
Behind that belligerent faade lies an unusually keen eye for fashion, too, given his background of working for New Zealand-born Colette Dinnigan, one the world’s leading bridal designers. Cheika and wedding dresses: it is, by any stretch, a difficult mental image to conjure. Dinnigan has brushed off any suggestion of Cheika’s brutishness, describing him, in her experience, as a “gentle giant”. But it is his rottweiler persona with which the Wallabies have become more acquainted of late.
To watch the footage of his halftime unravelling in Salta, Argentina, last month, when he sprayed the players with such invective that one briefly feared for the welfare of captain Michael Hooper, was to catch a glimpse of a man on the edge. That impression was confirmed soon after, as an emotional Cheika spoke, in a quavering voice, about how his team had somehow turned a 31-7 deficit into a 45-34 win. “This isn’t just a game,” he said. “It’s personal.”
It usually is personal with Cheika. By degrees, his four-year reign at the Wallabies has hardened into an autocracy, with losses of temper ever more frequent and explosive.
Ahead of Australia’s last match at Twickenham 12 months ago, he appeared to mouth the words “f***ing cheats” after a try was disallowed during a heavy defeat to England.
He later lambasted a reporter for her perceived temerity in asking him about it. Such has been the pattern recently, with increasing pressure on his position creating ever more combustible displays.
After loss to the All Blacks, he called the media “nave” for daring to suggest that he was worried about his future, while he is also understood to have had a screaming row with the family of a development player for not doing exactly as he prescribed.
Cheika, in many ways, is among the last of the great bruisers in Australian coaching. Rather like Des Hasler, of rugby league’s Manly Sea Eagles, who once ended a rant by ripping a dressing-room door off its hinges, Cheika leaves people guessing as to which way his apoplectic rages will turn next.
It is a moot point, though, as to how much these meltdowns are helping his players. Australia have lost eight of their
12 tests
this year, losing a series at home to Ireland and winning just two of six in the Rugby Championship.
Once considered a brooding genius, who marked England’s premature exit from the last World Cup with a sly pump of the fist, Cheika is these days coming across more as a street-fighting liability.
Rugby Australia can hardly say they were not warned. In their haste to appoint a successor in 2014 to Ewen McKenzie, who dramatically resigned amid a torrent of rumour around his private life, they turned to a man known for pushing his players to extremes. At the Waratahs, he was fined for allegedly abusing a cameraman and stormed out of a coaching box in such a frenzy that he smashed a window. While Cheika might have cut the consummate diplomat this week, attending a reception at the Australian High Commission in London, he threatens another outburst if the tide turns against him at Twickenham tomorrow.
He presents the same dilemma the Rugby Football Union has faced over Eddie Jones. Former teammates at Randwick, the two are scrappers to their core, born renegades whose excesses have often been excused by their results. The problem comes, however, when the form of their teams starts to fray.
With Jones’ honeymoon curtailed so dramatically by England’s fifthplace finish in this year’s Six Nations, attention shifted to the darker side of his methods, to the obsessiveness, the whiplash tongue, the penchant for flogging players like Navy Seals.
It is the same situation for Cheika: reach a World Cup final, as he did in 2015, and his hot-headedness is portrayed as passion, but engineer Australia’s “worst season since 1958” — the words of former coach Bob Dwyer — and it starts to be seen as little more than gratuitous thuggery.
And yet where Cheika and Jones are also aligned is in the fact they are, for now, un-sackable. Jones knows he will not be removed at such a critical juncture in England’s World Cup cycle. Likewise, firing Cheika would merely be a short-term fix for Australia. Cheika should be celebrated while he lasts, as a true Antipodean pugilist struggling to hold on to what dignity he has left. Against his old mate, it promises to be quite a show.
This isn’t just a game. It’s personal. Michael Cheika