Cheika: You don’t know how good you have it with Eddie
England head coach’s old Australian sparring partner tells critics they should count their blessings about Jones’ reign
It would be about this point in an England versus Australia week that Michael Cheika would normally be lobbing a verbal grenade towards the Poms, while his former Randwick team-mate Eddie Jones would be busy scouring through his own munitions store to return fire.
Jones always tended to have the last laugh, winning all seven of their encounters, with the final victory in the 2019 World Cup quarter-final costing Cheika his job as Australia head coach.
Now would appear to be the perfect opportunity for Cheika to put the boot into his rival, given that Jones’s position is under pressure following the fifth-place finish in the Six Nations and renewed scrutiny of his intense coaching methods.
Yet Cheika refrains. Instead, as a dispassionate observer, his message to the English rugby public is that you do not know how good you have it, pointing to the results ledger before and after Jones took over.
“I think that if I go back to the last time that Australia beat England, which was in the 2015 World Cup, and I look at what has happened with England since then it has been a pretty good result for England,” Cheika says. “If you step back and look at it, they have had multiple successes in the Six Nations. They have made a World Cup final. If you look at his [Jones’s] record, he has done an exceptional job and he has been in situ for six years, which is not easy when you are leading the English rugby union.”
Just as it was Jones who administered the last rites to Cheika’s reign, so Cheika cost Stuart Lancaster his job when Australia knocked England out of the 2015 World Cup. Jones’s winning record of 77.3 per cent – the highest of any England head coach – since then has come at the cost of a fair few bruised bodies and even more egos. According to Cheika, who has his own abrasive edge, this is the price you pay for the pursuit of success.
“He is very single-minded around what he’s going to do and that will rub people up the wrong way,” Cheika says. “That’s what happens. Whenever you operate like that and you have the courage to operate like that, how Eddie does, then you know whenever something goes wrong – and I have been in this situation myself – people will come after you.
“At the end of the day, if you look back to the last World Cup cycle around this time they had a bit of a wobble as he made changes and moved guys out of the system. He is doing the same now and putting pressure on different guys to come up to his level. I think the next couple of years, the same thing will happen.
“He will keep doing it his way, he will rub a few people up the wrong way but ultimately you will get judged in the bigger moments like the World Cup.”
As team-mates, Cheika, the son of Lebanese immigrants, and Jones, whose mother is American-japanese, seemed to be naturally drawn to each other. They also shared a highly developed sledging ability, which they turned on each other during media conferences.
“Eddie was a great guy to play footie with,” Cheika says. “I loved playing games with him, both in the way he motivated his own team and got stuck into the opposition. I enjoyed playing footie with him and therefore I will always cherish our relationship because it was built on that foundation. He certainly had the upper hand in our battles. That goes with the territory and sometimes
you have to got to own it and say I was not good enough so I am going to try to improve.”
Cheika’s desire for self-advancement has taken him in many different directions. He has accepted consultancy coaching roles with the NRL team Sydney Roosters and the Argentina national team, as well as being appointed director of rugby for the Green Rockets Tokatsu in Japan’s League One.
Most intriguingly, he has also committed to leading Lebanon at the Rugby League World Cup. “That is a passion project for me, being of Lebanese heritage,” Cheika says. “I did not think I would get the opportunity
to do something for the country of my parents’ origin in my area of expertise in rugby or rugby league in this instance.
“It is a country where there’s so much strife and turmoil, so to just give them a chance to watch their national team play and forget about their worries for 80 minutes, even if they know nothing or very little about rugby league, is something I needed to do.”
Michael Cheika was speaking on behalf of Amazon Prime Video, where you can watch the Autumn Nations Series for £7.99 a month, with a free 30-day trial for new members.