Cannon: Hamish McLennan and Eddie Jones turned Wallabies’ World Cup dreams into nightmare and must go

The naive decision to sack Dave Rennie in favour of Eddie Jones backfired massively on those in power at Rugby Australia, and someone has to pay the price for it, writes Brendan Cannon.

DAILY TELEGRAPH. JANUARY 31, 2023. Pictured at Matraville Sports High School today is new Wallabies head coach Eddie Jones during a press conference to announce his appointment. Picture: Tim Hunter.

My heart bleeds for this group of Wallabies players, who now don’t know who to trust and have been set up to fail by inept decision-makers who should do the right thing and step down.

Rugby Australia gambled the house, and paid the ultimate price by sacking Dave Rennie as coach, getting rid of chief executive Andy Marinos, released the assistant coaches and brought in a whole new group with Eddie Jones, and Eddie then transitions established, experience players out of the group.

Australian rugby is staring at the abyss.

While RA chairman Hamish McLennan is happy to say this has been a 20-year evolution, in 2015 we were in the World Cup final, so it’s not fair to deflect and say it’s been 20 years in the making.

It was such a naive decision to get rid of Dave Rennie after he’d already held his first World Cup training camp at the start of the year. How confusing is that for the players, their anxiety would have increased enormously.

Dave Rennie’s sacking was a naive decision. (Photo by Filippo MONTEFORTE / AFP)

As I’ve said before, as a rugby player, the World Cup is your Olympics. For some in the group, it will be the only one they play in.

And they’ve had it tainted, and will be forever scarred. What should have been a career highlight will be looked back upon as a nightmare.

Eddie has become a lightning rod for everyone’s hatred of the Wallabies. You simply can’t go forward with him in charge, because supporters and sponsors openly despise him.

I had Eddie as my Wallaby coach and I valued him and his influence for me, but even I was uncomfortable with how condescending and arrogant he was in press conferences as the figurehead for the Wallabies side.

When you’re all about professionalism, and you’ve got the coach berating journalists who are extension and platform to promote the game, ridiculing them and making defamatory remarks to them and how little they knew about the game, you’re devaluing your own brand.

Eddie was already cooked prior to this World Cup campaign, with the scrutiny and lack of success he’d had in England.

Jones’ attitude with the media has caused quite a stir. Picture: Tim Hunter.

McLennan says he had to sign Eddie for five years otherwise he’d have gone to Japan. Well, how has that worked out? He has presided over the worst performance in Australia’s World Cup history and could still end up in Japan next year.

They should have allowed Rennie to see out his campaign, and sign Eddie from 2024 onwards.

His tenure has been an abject failure, and McLennan is responsible as the man in charge of the decisions that led to this.

He needs to own his mistakes and pass on the baton.

It will take a long time for this group of players to recover. Sadly, I don’t see it happening by the 2025 British & Irish Lions series.

Your employer axed the coach you’ve been listening to for three years, and released the CEO four months out from the World Cup, so no matter how much they try to emphasise stability or how much Eddie tried to settle them down, the anxiety in the group would have been prevalent from the very beginning.

The Wallabies’ players were destroyed by a lack of stability. (Photo by Jan Kruger/Getty Images)

Any time you’re in a playing squad it’s all about stability. When they’ve had six Test captains in seven Tests, multiple combination changes across the playing group, that only compounds the apprehension in the group.

They would’ve been looking around for guidance in the team huddle, needing experienced heads to calm them, and instead seen just as much fear in their teammates eyes.

I’ve seen some lows in rugby in recent times, but this is almost soul-destroying.

Friends and work colleagues have been ringing me this week to vent. I feel their pain, but I can’t honestly tell them that I see us climbing out of the hole we’re in.

Originally published as Cannon: Hamish McLennan and Eddie Jones turned Wallabies’ World Cup dreams into nightmare and must go