Rugby Australia discussed replacing Michael Cheika in 2018
Rugby Australia discussed replacing Michael Cheika with Dave Rennie or Scott Johnson in 2018 but the governing body believed a World Cup failure under the former Wallabies coach would be less damaging to them.
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Rugby Australia considered replacing Michael Cheika with either Dave Rennie or Scott Johnson at the end of last year, but voted against it believing the public backlash to a failed World Cup campaign under either man would have been worse than that by Cheika.
Instead, they appointed Johnson to oversee Cheika as director of rugby, and are now tipped to employ Rennie as Cheika’s successor.
Revelations that Cheika argued loudly with chief executive Raelene Castle at the Australian Embassy in Tokyo before the pool match defeat to Wales last month has exposed the dysfunctional relationship between the coach and his bosses.
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The bitter fallout between Cheika and Castle and chairman Cameron Clyne was laid bare after the coach stood down from his role following the 40-16 thrashing to England in the quarter-finals last weekend and said he barely had a relationship with either.
However, Castle and Clyne helped Cheika remain in the job last December when they assessed three options after he’d coached the Wallabies to the worst calendar year of results in the modern era.
The first was to sack Cheika and replace him with a proven world-class coach, but this was quickly dismissed after they realised they could not lure any of the top candidates away from their contracts, with all locked in to coach at the World Cup.
The other option was to sack Cheika and replace him with an interim head coach, either Rennie or Johnson, and assess their positions after the World Cup.
However, this would have forced RA to pay out Cheika $1 million and they feared that an early exit by the Wallabies in Japan would have been far more scathing than sticking with the man who had been at the helm for four years.
But given Cheika’s woeful results, they weren’t prepared to stick with status quo and agreed to bring in Johnson as director of rugby, as well as adding a third man — Michael O’Connor — to a selection panel to question Cheika’s decisions on the team.
They conceded to Cheika’s demands to dump Stephen Larkham as attack coach, but Cheika was seething that he was now being overseen by Johnson.
Cheika also proposed a World Cup training camp in the United States that was heavily over budget because the Wallabies couldn’t lock down a revenue-generating warm-up match against United States, and he had to eventually settle for two weeks in Noumea, which cost significantly less.
Even though some players were annoyed to be leaving their families for two additional weeks when they’d been in camp for The Rugby Championship for five weeks and were then heading to Japan for at least another seven, RA had decided to grant Cheika his getaway wish within the bounds of the Wallabies budget.
“He pretty much got what he wanted, we were conscious of not creating a situation where if Cheika had a poor World Cup he could turn around and say he didn’t get this or that,” a senior RA official told The Daily Telegraph.
Now a review into the Wallabies’ failure will be conducted by Johnson, however because he was a part of the campaign RA is leaning towards bringing in an independent person to assist him.
While some have suggested Castle should be sacked, she is in the middle of negotiating a major television rights deal and is across the nuances of the complex SANZAAR relationships, and the RA board believes it would create unnecessary instability to bring in someone new right now.
There are also reports that Clyne will stand down as chairman at next April’s annual general meeting, but it’s understood he still retains support from his fellow board members and is keen to continue well into next year.
Originally published as Rugby Australia discussed replacing Michael Cheika in 2018