Rugby Australia chair Paul McLean always did what he thought right

Throughout the tumult the code has been through in recent years, outgoing Rugby Australia chairman Paul McLean has kept his poise.

Former Wallaby and outgoing Rugby Australia chairman Paul McLean.

The penalty came fairly early in the Murrayfield Test on the Saturday before Christmas in 1981 and the shoulders of the Scottish players slumped as they saw the Wallabies goalkicker, Paul McLean, collect the ball and look appraisingly at the posts. No one had the slightest inkling what was about to happen next.

The penalty had been awarded just to the right of the uprights and McLean, though unaccountably out-of-form the previous week against Wales when he had kicked only two from six, could have landed the goal in his sleep. Except he wasn’t sleeping. Instead, he was tossing and turning in his bed, replaying those missed kicks that contributed to Australia losing 18-13.

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Everyone assumed he would take the shot. Everyone was wrong. In a flash, he had weighed up that Brendan Moon was virtually unmarked on the left wing and, long before Beauden Barrett or Richie Mo’unga had mastered the art, he had dropped the ball onto his right foot and kicked precisely into the space ahead of the sprint champion.

The Scots barely had time to react before Moon had caught the ball and placed it over the line for what in those days was a four-point try. McLean missed the conversion. McLean and Moon had executed the move twice before, once for Brothers, once for Queensland, but Murrayfield had never seen it before and was agog at the audacity of the play.

“Combined decision-making process,” McLean explained this week.

“I had backed myself on the punt kick but I sure wasn’t backing myself on the place kick. And I thought it was an easy four points.”

It is not possible to mention the 1981 Wallabies tour without McLean looking crestfallen. He knows that Australian team could have been the first Wallabies side ever to win the Grand Slam, three years ahead of Andrew Slack’s team. Jean Pierre Rives, the legendary French captain had predicted it. “I am sure you will have Grand Slam,” he had said on the night of July 11 that year, after his Five Nations champion side had lost both Tests to the Wallabies in Australia.

The Wallabies scored more tries than their opposition in every Test, tallying nine to three, but they won only one Test out of four, against Ireland, when in the words of The Guardian rugby writer David Frost, McLean’s decision making had been “exemplary”.

Rugby Australia found itself overwhelmed by the Isrel Folau saga but Paul McLean has no regrets at the board’s decisions. Picture: AFP

Certainly there were other more important reasons why the Grand Slam escaped them — they were totally outgunned in the set pieces and the fact that captain Tony Shaw, an out-and-out blindside flanker, was forced to play in the second row says it all — but the easy explanation was that McLean kicked seven goals from 18 attempts.

He would take his revenge against Scotland the following year, kicking a record of 21 points as the Wallabies racked up their highest score and winning margin against a major Test nation, allowing him to head off into retirement as the then greatest Australian pointscorer ever. But 1981 always hurt.

Still, even when it was all falling apart, McLean held his poise and found a way to conjure up an unexpected result out of the wreckage. It has become the mark of the man.

McLean blames the man who coached him on that tour and throughout his 100 games for Queensland, Bob Templeton, for getting him involved in rugby administration. Templeton died unexpectedly in 1999 and in the week of his funeral McLean found colourful QRU personality George Pippos on his doorstep, dragooning him for the suddenly vacant position of QRU president.

Twenty-one years later, McLean is about to enter his final week as chairman of Rugby Australia, again a job he never wanted and one which, like the goalkicking duties on that long-ago tour, has brought him little but grief.

Former RA chief executive Raelene Castle. ‘We were never going to get clear air while she remained,’ McLean says of the call to replace her. Picture: AAP

Under persistent prodding from his old inside centre Michael Hawker, then chairman himself, McLean came onto the RA board in 2013 and over time was enmeshed in the two most divisive decisions RA has ever made — to cull the Western Force and then to cut Israel Folau.

The first decision tore at his heart but he went along with it because he felt that Australian rugby was going broke attempting to maintain five Super Rugby franchises. Now that the Force are effectively self-sustaining, he is doing everything in his power to bring them back into the fold, temporarily this year, but on a far more permanent basis next year, hopefully. The Folau decision, however, causes no similar regrets.

“I would do it again because I think he did the wrong thing,” McLean said.

But there was a cost.

“We got so swept up in things like the Western Force and then Israel Folau that it became all-consuming. There were 8000 articles written about Folau before he even went to the tribunal. Circumstances were abnormal and when things are abnormal, sometimes you miss the correct decision and we suffered from that.”

Released at last from that endless saga by the out-of-court settlement with Folau, RA has spent the past months wrestling with the steering wheel but, prior to that, McLean admits the board failed in its duty of oversight.

“You can blame the CEO (Raelene Castle) or you can blame the board or you can blame both. I think we as a board needed to take some responsibility for that as well. I suppose we weren’t tough enough at the end of the day and we should have been.

“She (Castle) had a better relationship with the states than any previous CEO and she worked hard at that. And she was able to find a Wallabies coach that I believe will be very good. Dave Rennie and Scott Johnson (RA’s director of coaching) … the proof will be in the pudding but they are two outstanding appointments.”

That said, McLean was the chairman who ultimately decided Castle had to go. “We were never going to get clear air while she remained,” he explained.

Those who know McLean will realise how out-of-character that decision was. He is, at the core of his being, someone who brings people together.

“It was not a pleasant few days,” he said of that time. “I lost four kilos in 10 days — and I’m not overweight.”

In recent weeks, his entire focus has been on sorting out the finances and getting the books squared away, getting rugby back on the paddock and securing a new chairman to replace him. Vital decisions every one, yet by the time of the June 15 board meeting when Hamish McLennan will step into the chairman’s role, all three should have been achieved.

“What he has done was to bring everything to a head, which had to happen,” said Geoff Stooke, whose long-time friendship with McLean was strained by the Force decision that provoked Stooke to resign from the board. But through it all, he believes McLean has been a force for good, especially in recent weeks.

“I think he has done well. What he has tried to do was leave things a little better than when he took over and I think he has. He’s a thorough gentleman and an ornament to the game.”