Why has Australian rugby left the mercurial Michael Cheika sitting on the bench?
In the middle of a blockbuster Lions tour, the mercurial coach returns to Australia without a role in the code that made his name, and eyeing off a transition to the NRL.
Big Michael Cheika is coming home. The Clovelly boy with Lebanese roots is returning to Sydney after coaching top-tier English provincial side Leicester Tigers to a Premiership Rugby final. There’ll be, he says, no more ten-month European, Argentinian or Japanese rugby gigs. No more hotels. No more video calls home in the middle of the night. Not for a while, anyway.
But the homecoming – spurred by a desire to spend time with his wife Stephanie and their four school-aged children – is bittersweet. The 58-year-old coach boasts a CV of greatest rugby hits in two hemispheres and four continents, but on the eve of the British and Irish Lions tour, nobody at Rugby Australia appeared to be listening. Passed over in April for the Wallabies head coaching job and overlooked by the NSW Waratahs (a chronically underperforming side he led in 2014 to its first and only Super Rugby title), Cheika is heading home a stranger in his own land, or at least his profession.
Is he rugby’s perennial outsider? “There’s not really a place for me to coach at home,” he confessed when I caught him on the line in London late last month, as he was packing his bags for Dublin to attend the British and Irish Lions warm-up game against his old side Argentina. “At least not in rugby, that’s pretty clear. I’d have to make the transition to league.”
I reached out to Cheika last year when he was briefly in Sydney, a few months into his stint with Leicester Tigers. Even then his domestic rugby career looked uncertain. He’d been exploring opportunities in league, and in June made an unsuccessful tilt at the then-vacant Parramatta Eels head coaching job. We caught up in the wake of Kiwi Joe Schmidt’s appointment as head coach of the Wallabies – a two-year rebuilding role after the disastrous experiment with Eddie Jones – and before the job was passed like a baton change to Queensland Reds coach Les Kiss, who had worked as Schmidt’s assistant coach at Ireland (Kiss will succeed Schmidt in mid-2026). Having firmly established a reputation as a renovator and change-agent, Cheika had been tasked with a rebuild at Leicester after they finished a lacklustre eighth in 2024 under Dan McKellar, who left to take on the current NSW Waratahs role.
Cheika’s coaching reputation in England and the affection in which he’s held at Leicester couldn’t be higher. He tells me a story of bonding with the club’s fans after a heavy loss to French club Toulouse in January, how he apologised to them in the airport on the way home, but they’d hear nothing of it. “Don’t you be saying sorry to us!”, they upbraided him. Now that he’s leaving, they’ve reminded him of that moment – in person or by email – when he’d shown how much he cared. “They’re such loyal fans,” he reflects.
England and Leicester prop Dan Cole, who retired after last month’s Premiership final, recalled to me his first impressions. “At first he comes across as being all blood and guts … but he’s very analytical and strategic, and as the year went on he started figuring out what worked best for us. The more you get to know him, the more you appreciate his intelligence. He’s a great thinker.” And then he says what many of us have been thinking all along: “I don’t really know Australian rugby but someone like Cheik, with that much clout and knowledge of the game – you’d want him in it somewhere. Rugby’s better with Cheik in it.”
Cheika could have stayed on with the Tigers, but he’d asked for a one-year contract and stuck to it despite a generous offer to extend. Since the 23-21 loss to Bath in the Premiership final at the home of English rugby, Twickenham, Cheika has had several coaching offers from European clubs. While his heart is taking him home, his head is already lamenting lost opportunities. “That’s the real contradiction I’ve got to go on with now,” he tells me.
In the current Lions series, Wallabies fans will be reminded how thoroughly a red Anglo-Celtic army can own an Australian stadium – like colonisation all over again. There is a curiously introverted mildness to Australian rugby culture. In the past decade, the Wallabies have been habitually beaten up in the physical battles against the world’s best; Australian fans, thirsty for sustained success, delight in the national side’s erratic victories but the code has struggled to appeal to a wider audience. At home, in the stands, fans can often be out-enthused by opposing tribes. Against the might of the Lions’ combined England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales side, the Wallabies will need to find aggression in their forwards, attacking flair from their backline, and the rugby nous for which they were once famous. Pundits are hopeful the Wallabies can find a way to win, but are by no means convinced they can.
Cheika, by temperament, stands apart from the mild-mannered Australian rugby mainstream. He’s passionate and hard-edged and expressive – at times to a fault. His older brother Paul, with whom he played rugby at storied Sydney club Randwick in the late ’80s and early ’90s, says the pair were often (unfairly in his view) viewed as “hot heads” on the field. Reflecting on their playing days, Paul wonders if there isn’t a stigma in Australian rugby circles about “displays of emotion”. Morgan Turinui, a former Wallabies centre, coach, and now commentator, regards “hot-headed” as a fair description of the two in their prime, but there’s no doubt in his mind Cheika is “one of the smartest blokes I’ve ever worked with”, adding:“He knows what winning looks like, he knows how to fix and renovate teams. I’d say his greatest years of coaching are ahead of him.”
If Cheika were to decide tomorrow to bow out of rugby, his highlight reel would include his days spent coaching Randwick’s Galloping Greens in the early noughties. It was his second coaching gig – he took on his first, with Petrarca Rugby in Italy, without any coaching experience at all, but he proved a natural.“He’s the winningest coach I’ve ever played under. I never lost a game under him,” says Turinui.
Well before rugby turned professional, 22-year-old Cheika left Sydney for the French side Castres Olympique. For the next seven northern winters he played rugby in France and Italy, returning like a migratory tern every southern winter to run out for the Galloping Greens. He was a rugby cosmopolitan – at home wherever his sodden boots were hanging out to dry – ahead of his time. Cheika played on one tour for the Tahs but never made the Wallabies. “I wasn’t considered good enough,” he says. Was he good enough? “Mate,” he replies with a touch of steel, “I’d always back myself.”
After his coaching success at Randwick, Irish club Leinster took a punt on him in 2005 and, Irish luck being what it is, Cheika led them to a European championship victory, the Heineken Cup, in 2009. After five years in Ireland, he headed for Paris club Stade Français. Turinui, though hesitant at first – “I didn’t want to break our winning streak” – joined him in Paris. Cheika was appointed head coach of the Waratahs in 2012, then the Wallabies in 2014, taking the national team to the 2015 World Cup final, where they were beaten by New Zealand 34-17. That year he was named rugby world coach of the year by the code’s international governing body. His tenure ended in 2019, and by 2023, as head coach of Argentina, he was pivotal in Los Pumas’ impressive run to a World Cup semi.
A parallel (and equally entertaining) highlight reel would also include Cheika’s captain-cranky moments in the coaching box, stalking the sidelines, or in a sulphurous mood fronting the media. If anyone inside the tent has been game enough to capture on film his fiery half-time coaching rev-ups, they’d make for riveting viewing. Over time, Cheika has learned to temper his passion behind an insouciant big-cat swagger and a gravelly Aussie drawl. But there’s no doubt, family and friends attest, that he’s coming home with fire in the belly and “unfinished” rugby business in his sights.
If this latest plot twist in his career bore some resemblance to a Falafel Western, he’d be returning with an eye on revenge. But all he wants, he tells me, is to do what he loves doing and does best. “Rugby is great fun,” he says. Aside from the fun, is it winning that keeps the motor humming? “Yeah yeah yeah!” he shoots back in a “waddayareckon dimwit” inflexion. “It’s the challenge of getting individual players to reach their potential and teams to win.”
Cheika’s path through Australian culture as a child of Lebanese migrants, coupled with success in the fashion business – he heads, with a business partner, a UK fashion company that he describes as “sub-luxury” – has marked him as an outlier in the rugby world. And yet his pinballing life around the globe fits perfectly with culturally diverse, well-travelled contemporary Australia. It was one of the charms of his time with Leicester. “I’ve coached in so many different places it’s ridiculous,” he says. “And now I’ve had the experience of the real Anglo-Saxon culture. I’ve learnt from it.”
That Premiership final loss to Bath showed that while Cheika has mellowed with age, there’s still a hint of the fire-breathing dragon about him. The cameras caught him during that match storming down to the sidelines to stop his Tigers coaching staff assailing a match official over a poor decision, only to inflame the fracas by calling the referees “useless”.
“Michael Cheika is absolutely raging,” remarked a match commentator. Cheika next turned to Brian O’Driscoll, a legendary Ireland player turned commentator, who was trying to stay clear of the drama. O’Driscoll later told a sports podcast: “He [Cheika] came over and started giving out about the referee but it almost looked as if he was giving out to me as well, and I was like: ‘I haven’t done anything!’” The cameras caught O’Driscoll – who also felt the referees had made a stinker of a decision – erupting with laughter as Cheika stormed back to his coaching lair in the stands. Cheika later sent a video clip of the incident to O’Driscoll with the caption: “I’m glad we’re still making memories out there, mate.”
I first met Cheika as he was settling into his job as Wallabies head coach. During a five-year stint he would lead the national side to 34 wins, 32 losses and two draws: a creditable result for a code facing stiff competition at home from the rampant NRL and AFL; a rugby-obsessed trans-Tasman rival and magnet for the Pacific’s best athletic talent; and predatory northern hemisphere clubs with the cash to poach Australian players in their prime. But 2019, his last year with the Wallabies, was ugly on many levels. Cheika, the Wallabies and the code itself suffered successive humiliations on the field and the fractious Israel Folau affair off it. At year’s end, Cheika fell on his sword. Looking back on that time, he believes the 2017 culling of the Western Force from Super Rugby (the Perth team was admitted back in 2020) was a key part of this “dispiriting” picture.
Dusting himself down, Cheika ploughed on. He took a short-term job as assistant coach of the NRL’s Sydney Roosters, then a fleeting position as director of rugby at Japanese side the Green Rockets, slowly building his way back. He started as head coach of Argentina in 2022 not with a whimper but a bang, leading Los Pumas to victories over Scotland, England (at Twickenham) and the Wallabies in that year. The last win was at once redemptive and emotionally unsettling. Afterwards he told reporters, “I love these guys, they’re my crew now … I was up on the last try, cheering. But then I started crying because I know I probably shouldn’t be doing this. It was a bit confusing for me, personally.” By the end of 2024 he’d found his coaching mojo and silenced his critics with a David v Goliath victory against the All Blacks in Wellington, and taken Los Pumas to a World Cup semi against New Zealand where the roles were reversed.
It was early November 2024 when Cheika and I met in Sydney. He’d returned for a few weeks to the family home in Clovelly after a break in the provincial rugby season. We caught up on the morning after a memorable Wallabies win over England, at a local café of his choosing, the bikini-clad power walkers and gauzy sub-tropical skies a world away from the East Midlands cathedral city of Leicester. Schmidt’s Wallabies had trumped the old enemy 42-37 at Twickenham on the bell, Max Jorgensen’s photogenic swan dive over the try line securing the win. Cheika, with his stubble and receding hair cropped to roughly the same length, his cauliflower ears and a rugby scar (or trophy) meandering across his scalp, can look a little Romper Stomper. But he was all smiles that morning. He loved not only the victory but the manner in which it was achieved – “the confidence”. Yet as we queued for our orders I noticed him, with a pained expression, glued to a lengthy email on his phone. Was there a problem?, I asked. “England’s screwing us,” he groaned. “Again!”
He looked ready to crush the device there and then in his great paw. His beef, it quickly emerged, was with the wheel of sporting fortune: three England players injured in the game against the Wallabies were Cheika’s charges at Leicester. His side, he boasted that day, had won “five out of six” games and sat second on the Premiership table. But he’d need all hands on deck to make it to the June 2025 finals.
“It’s a bit of a strange situation,” he confessed in a voice that, despite his global roaming and his fluency in Arabic, French and Italian, stubbornly retains its wobbly Australian vowels. “English players I once thought of as enemies, I’m now friends with. I don’t know what they thought of me at Leicester on my first day as head coach.” But he recalled what he thought that day. “Don’t turn up in the club strip,” he told himself. “You’ve got to earn it first!”
At season’s end, he spoke to me of his surprise and delight at the way old enmities had flipped into firm friendships. Cole was one of those players Cheika as Wallabies coach loved to loathe. And yet he was “enraged”, by his own admission, when Cole was yellow-carded towards the end of the final and deprived of a dignified last hoorah. “It’s amazing what the game can do,” he reflects. “How it can turn things around once you have a personal connection with a player you respect, even though you might once have not been – because that was your job – their greatest fan.”
In his celebrated book In the Name ofIdentity, the French-Lebanese writer Amin Maalouf underlines the complexity of psychological allegiances and affiliations – national, religious, ethnic – for those who by virtue of family background or migration are in some sense “mixed”. When I put Maalouf’s insight about the error of assuming there is one single “essential” identity to Cheika, he’s in enthusiastic agreement.
His father Joseph arrived from Lebanon with enough money for a cab from the airport but not much else. The year was 1950. The cabbie asked him where he was headed and Joe confessed he had no idea. The driver, who knew a thing or two about inner Sydney and its working-class urban chequerboard, dropped Joe and his suitcase outside the Christian Maronite Church in Redfern. “The church was where the community was,” Cheika tells me. “And what’s across the road from the church? Redfern Oval – home of the Rabbitohs. So rugby league became a way for Dad and his mates to integrate.”
As a child, Cheika heard tales from Joe of what he calls “normal Aussie racism” – more playful than wounding, but enough to unnerve newcomers. “For immigrants there was always a question around, how do I become more of an Aussie? And their answer was, ‘Let’s take a look at the footy.’ That’s just what Dad and his mates did. The Lebanese community embraced rugby league. They became strong followers of the code because of its working-class origins.
“If you look at Parramatta, St George, Wests Tigers, the Bulldogs, they’ve got a big Lebanese community following – and when the Rugby League World Cup is here in 2026, I promise you’ll see the support for the Lebanese team.”
For young Mick and Paul Cheika, rugby – league and union – was a welcoming embrace, an entry ticket to mainstream Aussie culture.
From the Lebanese hub of Redfern, many new arrivals moved west, but Joe Cheika went east. The boys were raised close to Coogee Oval, home of the Galloping Greens. That brought union, the toff’s code, into play. If you could carry a ball hard into a pod of forwards, you were as good as the next bloke. Cheika remembers a visit to a Randwick game – a warm-up for the touring All Blacks – with a cousin from Brazil. “He left at half-time shaking his head and saying, ‘This is barbaric’. They wouldn’t have seen anything like it over there – their contact sport was soccer.” It was the abrasive side of the game that Cheika embraced as a hard-running, 190cm-tall number 8, binding at the back of the scrum.
At the 2021 Rugby League World Cup, Cheika turned his hand to coaching league at an international level, leading the lowly Lebanese Cedars to the quarter finals (where they were rinsed, nine tries to one, by the world champion Australian Kangaroos). Cheika’s affinity for league has raised eyebrows in the rugby union community that he might be lost to the 13-man code when he returns to Australia. He is, he tells me, up for the challenge. “Crossing codes is one thing, but to do it at the top level – to be a leader, to be a success? That’s the challenge.”
And yet his time with the Cedars touched instincts other than those wired to professional ambition, drive and ego. It was an emotional thing. He can’t remember a time when Lebanon hasn’t tugged at his heart. He’d watch the news footage of Beirut’s agonies with his parents, Joe and Therese – both from the same Lebanese village – as well as his brother Paul and sister Caroline (“my loudest fan”). By his mid-teens he’d formed the view that regional powers Syria and Israel were chewing up his ancestral homeland for their own ends. He has always, he says, refrained from taking sides. “I’m for families,” he tells me. “Children. Opportunity.”
He visited Lebanon for the first time at the age of five, and after three months Arabic had shouldered out his infant English, or so he’s been told. At the age of 18, he returned. “When the plane landed, I definitely felt something,” he remembers. “That trip had a real impact. I’ve been back four or five times since – lots of cousins, lots of people. Dad always said he was Lebanese-Australian and we kids should think of ourselves as Australian-Lebanese, because we were born here. When the chance came to contribute to Lebanon by getting involved with the Cedars, I was very keen.” He hasn’t relinquished his role with the Cedars, and expects to take them through to the 2026 World Cup.
Cheika clearly has a fierce aversion to defeat. He has often looked like a walking anger-management issue and has come relatively late to the subtle art of displaying grace in defeat. But he’s changing. After the Tigers’ recent Premiership final loss he took a swipe at the referees, describing the call that sent Cole to the naughty chair for the last 10 minutes of his retirement game as an embarrassment for the code. Post-match, however, he was philosophical: “I’m allowed to be angry, but I’m over it and happy to accept the result now.”
As Cole tells it, he approached Cheika on the field after the game, shook his hand and apologised, and the coach told him to “shut up” – he’d done nothing wrong. Says Cole: “Afterwards we drank till three in the morning sitting around, all the boys, telling stories – and he loved it. I’m glad I had an opportunity to spend a year of my career in rugby experiencing a Cheika team on the inside rather than, you know, on the outside – as opposition.”
Cheika’s success isn’t limited to a swag of rugby silverware. His fashion business “ticks over”, as he puts it, and he’s found a parallel path in leadership consultancy, honed by an executive course at Stanford University in 2017. “There was me and 39 other business founders and CEOs. You think of yourself as a bit of an impostor in those situations because you’re from sport, but at the end of the day it’s crisis management and motivation.” He recalls asking a curly question of a US Federal Reserve official, and thinking afterwards: “I’ve been brought up [to be] respectful of elders and very conscious of social hierarchy – to think these are all hugely important people. But at the end of the day, they’re just normal folk and the decision-making process is pretty much the same whether you’re a footy coach, a CEO or a prime minister. They might have different sources of advice and the consequences of their decisions are different, obviously. But it’s about the intent you have in making decisions – your desire to do the best thing for the people you represent. I’ve really learned a lot from these people.”
Though experience has made him more reflective, it hasn’t, he insists, dampened his competitive drive. He’s still prepared to “rip into” a player with some tough love if needed. “Sometimes you need them to catch fire!” Has he evolved as a coach? “I wouldn’t say evolved so much as learned. Learned more from my experiences, whether it’s coaching Argentina, coaching in Japan. Coaching Lebanon. Leicester. The more experiences you have, the easier it is to adapt and react appropriately, because you’ve seen so much.”
It’s this wealth of experience that, in the view of rugby league great Matty Johns, equips Cheika to excel in that code. “He’d bring something a bit left of centre, and you can’t beat the top rugby league sides these days, the real standard bearers, if you just play a lesser version of their game. Cheik would bring a real point of difference. In addition he’s got three things you need at the top. He forms great relationships with his players. He’s a great communicator – players have a very good understanding of what he wants. And the third thing, which is vital in professional sport, is that he can handle pressure. The more experience a coach has, the greater the ability to handle all sorts of scenarios. Cheika just gets out there and goes for it, and if things don’t work out entirely, that’s the way it goes.”
Something of this quality he seems to have imbibed from his father Joe. “He did a bit of everything,” Cheika tells me. “He had to. He worked on the railways, for Singer sewing machines, and in time became a community leader. I learned from him not to be scared of failure, to get out there and get among them. I’m not afraid of risk – calculated risk.”
Turinui believes that famously combustible temperament is used “strategically” these days and a much more “self-aware” Michael Cheika is “probably too highly qualified for any jobs here in rugby, aside from the Wallabies. There’s a lot of stress on his mastery of the mental side of the game, his skill as a motivator. But you can easily forget that he’s a bloody good all-round footy coach. It always impressed me that he knew what he didn’t know. He’s now very aware of his strengths, where some of his technical knowledge isn’t, and he gets people around him who have that.” A return to international coaching elsewhere looks, for the moment, unlikely. Which brings a Sydney league club into focus, unless the deck chairs can be rearranged at Rugby Australia, whose CEO, Phil Waugh, declined a request to be interviewed for this story. Adds Turinui: “Something I’ve also learned about Cheika is that he’s unpredictable. I never know which way he’ll go.”
Nor, at this point, does Cheika. “I need to be home and spend time with the family,” he tells me. “But I’ve had a brilliant experience at Leicester. Rugby’s changing. I’ve learnt a lot. I need to see what’s happening at home, and if nothing’s happening – I might have to look overseas again.”
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