🏉 Wallabies vs Los Pumas
and a character named Michael Cheika
Michael Cheika hasn’t been on my Christmas card list since he dropped me from the Wallabies before the 2015 Rugby World Cup.
And almost nothing gave me more pleasure throughout my career than to hear he’d smashed a window in the coaching box, following a narrow Brumbies victory.
But it’s great to see him back on the international stage and his impact on the Argentinians as they beat the All Blacks was immense.
And while his energy and passion for the game are admirable, he’s also one of Rugby’s great characters.
Unafraid to be himself and something the game desperately needs more of.
When he was announced as Wallabies coach, I asked a friend who knew him:
“What’s he like?”
My friend replied:
“He’s like kickboxer with a tree to chop down. But instead of going away to sharpen his axe, he keeps kicking the tree until his leg is strong enough to chop it down”
‘Ok, he’s bloody determined’ I thought, a quality I really admire.
But as we all know, determination alone only gets you so far and as the great American President Abraham Lincoln famously said:
“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
I’m not sure the two big men would have seen eye to eye.
But to Cheika’s credit, he’s managed to kick down plenty of trees on his way to becoming the only coach to win both the Super Rugby and European titles.
Not to mention leading the Wallabies to the 2015 RWC Final, and the 2014 Preliminary final loss to the Tahs was the most physical game of Super Rugby I ever played.
We threw the kitchen sink at the Waratahs defensive line that night… but they held firm and countered with a number of knock out blows.
But I believe his biggest strength as a coach lies in his ability to push the emotional buttons of his players, by delivering the right message and the right time.
A skill that’s easier said than done, and repeatedly pushing player’s emotional buttons can come with a cost.
Every time you push the ‘fire up’ button and convince a player to ‘dig deep’ and ‘run through a brick wall’, the player is putting their trust in the coach that they’ll come out the other side victorious.
But once the fired-up player doesn’t break through the wall and starts losing, the player loses belief in what they're being told, and the messages that were so well received early on, start to fall on deaf ears.
I only had one Wallaby tour under Cheik. But he taught me a lot on that trip, including the power of symbolism.
How symbols can be used to communicate a message, and how they represent values to the people who look up to them.
At one team meeting, he went into great detail about the Australian Coat of Arms, and how neither the Kangaroo nor Emu can walk backwards.
He also went to great lengths to get us to write out a team poem/creed. One I think the 2015 team may have used during their heroic campaign all the way to the RWC final.
Now at the time, I thought it was airy-fairy hogwash.
But after a while, I realized that he trying to get us to define our identity. To write down on paper what we stood for and how we wanted to represent our people.
And I really liked the “let the club swing” analogy he used with the Waratahs on their road to the 2014 premiership.
And although I didn’t directly hear him say it, the message of just ‘giving it a go’ and not worrying about the result really resonated with me, as I’d gone back into my shell a couple of times, following some really tough losses.
A lesson I will continue to live by and “just give things a go”.
Now, none of this is supposed to take away from the great work of Head Coach Mario Ledesma and the Argentinian players, but for the Wallabies to win on Saturday, they’ll need to overcome the most spirited and confident Argentinan team in years.
A team hell-bent on representing their people with pride and to bring some joy to a country that’s been doing it tough.
And like Eddie Jones and Bernie Larkham, I hope one day hope we’ll get to see Cheik back coaching an Australian team, and I wish him all the best… just not this weekend!
Go Wallabies!
Thanks for this. I once read on The Roar that generally two types of coaches, head coaches and heart coaches. The head coach is the cerebral one, plenty of deep knowledge of the game, backed up by data that has been turned into analysis, on not only their team, but the opposition as well. Eddie Jones and Lord Laurie would be what I class as head coaches. Heart coaches are the (more) emotional ones, more focussed on the personal than the technical, using metaphors like teeing off, actually training with the team (I remember a picture of Cheika on a run with a Wallabies squad going up some hill in Sydney) and motivating them, like at the half time spray heard around the world.
I guess the challenge is to find the balance. Can you have someone who is both a heart and head coach, and posses the wisdom to know what tools to use?