The British and Irish Lions tour is still just a speck on the horizon, more than six months distant, but already the rumour mills are grinding into action. Wallaby supremo Joe Schmidt’s contract expires after the third Test of the series on 2 August, and after that all bets are off.
Despite a run of relative success in 2024, and clear signs of improvement after a disastrous World Cup, the latest word is Schmidt may stick to the plan and quit after the Lions tour. He originally signed a two-year deal with Rugby Australia on the understanding his son Luke, who suffers from severe epilepsy, would limit his involvement to one half of a full four-year World Cup cycle.
As Schmidt commented just before taking up post as Ian Foster’s assistant with the All Blacks in 2023: “It is difficult. I remember an epileptologist once saying to me that we know more about the bottom of the ocean than what goes on between our ears.”
If he does walk, RA will be in the unenviable position of having to appoint its fourth national coach in as many years. It is a turbulent situation, and it raises the spectre of whether Australia can afford to install another foreigner as head coach.
A slight note of pique was evident in CEO Phil Waugh’s comments about the political uncertainties last week.
“We expect to sit down with Joe and work through the plan post-Lions, as we have said [previously],” Waugh revealed.
“A really important point, [one] that we continue to make, is that we do what we say we are going to do, and Joe was always committed through to the end of the Lions.
“We have done a lot of heavy lifting, there is progress in the Wallaby environment, he has surrounded himself with really good people, and now it’s important to give players and staff certainty.”
RA’s succession planning in the event of Schmidt’s departure is already rolling down the slipway, but there are some significant snags to overcome. Two of the major candidates, Les Kiss in Queensland and Dan McKellar at the Waratahs, are either at the start, or in a reboot of their Super Rugby careers.
Kiss has completed his debut season on a three-year deal with the Reds, while McKellar has yet to pick up the reins at Daceyville after an early release from the Leicester Tigers in the UK. Both are reestablishing their credentials back home. The other options are to offer Schmidt some leeway in the form of flexi-time, fitting work in around his family commitments so he can complete the four-year term; or to appoint another foreigner, maybe even one of Schmidt’s own choosing.
It is the last possibility which foreshadows Australia’s future as a rugby nation most darkly. The installation of foreign coaches can be a double-edged sword. Appointments from the present or recent past, such as Andy Farrell for Ireland, Shaun Edwards in France; Felix Jones, Aled Walters and now Tony Brown with the Springboks, and Eddie Jones in England have unquestionably provided a huge fillip to the national game in those countries. They bring a welcome infusion of new ideas and a natural lack of parochialism with them.
But there is a downside. There can be a problem returning the game back to its permanent custodians, and this has been for the most part, the experience in Australia and Wales. The similarities between the two nations are too obvious to ignore.
Wales entered the professional era all at sea, bottoming out at the deep end of the ocean with a 96-13 rout by the Springboks at Loftus Versveld in the summer of 1998. They lost all four provincial matches in South Africa on the same trip, and that triggered the appointment of Sir Graham Henry, the outstanding Kiwi coach of the Super Rugby-winning Auckland Blues.
Henry and his successor, Sir Steve Hansen, laid the groundwork for Wales’ first Grand Slam in 27 years in 2005, achieved under the stewardship of a Welshman groomed for the handover of power, Mike Ruddock. Within one year Ruddock was gone, ousted by player power and internal political wrangling. His replacement, Gareth Jenkins, fared even less well, posting a 30% win rate before Wales were unceremoniously dumped out of the 2007 World Cup at the pool stage by Fiji.
Wales had circled all the way back to square one, and the only perceived solution was another booster jab from abroad in the form of Warren Gatland. The man from the Waikato went on to post the most successful record in Welsh professional history over the next 11 years [2008-2019], taking his charges on an unprecedented five-match winning run over South Africa, claiming four Six Nations titles and reaching two World Cup semi-finals along the way.
When he retired from national duty at the end of the 2019 World Cup, the whirlpool of failure was waiting to suck a once-proud nation down into yet darker depths. Aucklander Wayne Pivac delivered a 38% win rate before Wales reached out for the Gatty-fix again. This time around, the box of pills was empty. Gatland has led Wales on a 12-match losing run, one record he would prefer to erase from his CV.
Australia have been following in Wales’ footsteps, roughly seven years behind. By 2005, the initial burnish of the Eddie Jones effect had worn off. His successor John ‘Knuckles’ Connolly first discovered the Wallaby players “like beaten down sheepdogs. If you walked in a room, they would have their heads down and were scared to do anything. There was no leadership. There was no development. It was a total void that took nearly a year to rebuild.”
It also took less than 12 months for Connolly himself to come under the media microscope, with 1984 Grand-Slammer Simon Poidevin lamenting the move towards “a conservative, risk-averse game. He should fall on his sword. We can’t do that. The Australian public will only support the Wallabies playing the way they have historically.”
Like ‘Ted’ in Wales, ex-Crusaders supremo Robbie Deans was the outstanding Super Rugby candidate when he was appointed as Australia’s first overseas head coach in 2008. Deans went on to earn the only win rate above 50% [58%] for Wallaby coaches in the past 17 years, leading Australia to its last Tri Nations victory and a World Cup semi-final in 2011. But Deans resigned amid rancour two years later, with ex-Wallaby great David Campese proclaiming: “unfortunately Robbie Deans has struggled to understand how we play the game in Australia.”
Deans was not alone in his misapprehension. When the Wallabies cycled back to a natural-born Aussie, Ewen McKenzie, things didn’t get better – they got worse. The Randwick man was the victim of some spectacular politicking worthy of the Ruddock era in Wales, finding himself among the coaching homeless in only his second year in the role.
Australia has followed Wales down the rabbit hole ever since, see-sawing between the home-grown and the Kiwi import: a violently passionate six-year affair with Waratah Michael Cheika followed by a far more sober transaction with another man of the Waikato, Dave Rennie; Rennie himself uprooted less than 10 months before the 2023 World Cup by the return of the prodigal son, Eddie Jones. Knuckles again: “How did we end up with Eddie again? He is full of it. He talks a great game but plays a terrible one. He was the captain’s pick by a chairman who just came into the job. It’s a bloody disaster.”
Within 10 months, the shooting arc of ‘Comet Eddie’ was spent, and another New Zealander was brought in to save the sinking ship. The story will be all too familiar to followers of Welsh rugby, they will be nodding their heads in rueful acknowledgement. In practice, adding overseas IP has only accelerated the destruction of coach education within the country, and succession planning – the seamless handover of power back to a native coach – has thus far proved to be an impossible task for both nations.
And that is Schmidt’s primary objective now: to pick exactly the right moment to empower to an Australian supremo as his natural successor, at a moment when the vital rugby signs in the country are burgeoning rather than dwindling. How, and when to leave the game in better state than the one in which he found it. Australia stands on the cusp of doing both itself and Wales a great favour, by discovering that elusive element in its coaching framework: continuity.
The recent game between the two nations in Cardiff represented probably Australia’s peak performance on tour, and it will have given Schmidt plenty of food for thought in relation to the blend of his back-five forward unit for the Lions. Nick Frost called the lineouts from number four, Will Skelton at five and an extra lineout option in the shape of Seru Uru at six instead of skipper Harry Wilson.
In this earlier article I showed just how Australia drove the maul so efficiently with Skelton in the second row after the catch had been made, but the ease with which the Wallabies won their own throw [12 out of 13] and pressured the Wales delivery [four steals out of 12] with one fewer receiver in the team was a surprise.
It was also a credit to the impeccable design fashioned by Wallaby lineout guru Geoff Parling. With the starters on the field, the throw was spread between Frost [five takes], Uru [four] with Bobby Valetini as the third option with three takes. How did the ex-Tigers, England and Lions lineout captain get the right people to the right spots before the formation of the drive?
One of the keys to the improvement of the Wallaby lineout has been the development of Valetini and Wilson as the third option, and Australia were twice successful using the same formation with a throw to Bobby V at the tail. Skelton starts at the front but shifts up the line past Uru and Frost to become the short-side lifter on the Wallaby eight. When you see this picture, you know the drive must convert.
When Uru was the target in the middle, Skelton did not have to move from his post to front-lift for the Queenslander.
By the end of the clip the big man has split the Welsh D asunder and there is fresh air ahead of him.
Throwing to Frost? No problem, just drop Seru out of the middle of the line and let the La Rochelle leviathan move up to block.
Want to drive for the corner flag? Simply leave the French-based giant where he is, at the front of the line to lead the drive out.
Can Australia get it right before the Lions arrive, with their army of 40,000 fans in support next July? A critical part of the process will be Schmidt’s decision about his own future, and the timing of his departure from the Wallabies.
Is there a home-grown coach ready to take on the full weight of that responsibility, and will there finally be some continuity between foreigner and native? Can New Zealander usher in Australian, or for that matter Welshman, with no loss of coaching impetus? The past in both countries utters a resounding ‘no’ but history is always ripe for the changing. As Schmidt put it so succinctly, “we know more about the bottom of the ocean than what goes on between our ears.”
I will preface this comment by saying that I hope Joe Schmidt continues for as long as he can as I think he has done a tremendous job to date. He has, in some ways, made the job a little harder for himself by initially relying on domestic based players and never really going over the top with OS based players even when he relaxed his policy a little more. I really enjoy how the team are playing at the moment.
I think Les Kiss, because (1) he has a bit more international experience, (2) has previously coached with Schmidt and in the same setup as Schmidt, might provide the smoothest transition, though I am not sure that this necessarily needs to be the case.
I would say one thing though about OS versus local coaches. I have a preference for local coaches but not for the reason that people might suppose (certainly not for the reason OJohn will have opined - I haven't read all the way down but I think I can guess it).
Australia has produced coaches of international standing who have won World Cups and major trophies. Bob Dwyer, Rod Macqueen, Alan Jones, Michael Cheika and Eddie Jones. I would add John Connolly - though he never got the international success he was highly successful with Queensland against quality NZ opposition and I think you could argue, never really got the run at international level that others did (OJohn might agree with that bit). Some of those are controversial but they all achieved high level results. You can add to that a number of assistants who worked OS at a high level.
But what the lack of a clear Australian coach suggests to me is that we are no longer producing coaches of international quality through our systems. We have had some overseas based coaches in our system like Thorn and Wessels and Cron (though I would suggest Thorn was a unique case who played for Australia in one code and NZ in the other and saw himself as a both a NZer and a Queenslander having arrived here at around age 12). Cron was developed in the Australian system anyway, so I don't have a problem with where he was born.
But my point is that we used to have systems in Australia that produced world class coaches. The systems developed by Dick Marks, which adopted and adapted some of the best coaching training approaches at the time from around the world (Wales particularly) but focussed on training Australian coaches with the best available methods, in my mind (as someone who grew up and began coaching late in that era) was a key part of what produced the highly skilled players that we produced at the time and also that produced those world class coaches. I think it was slipping already by the time I did my Level II certificate in 2002 and I think Eddie Jones influence and the priorities of the executive, particularly John O'Neill, might have been the beginning of the end. But if we have good coaching development programmes at school and junior level that will feed through to representative level then we will have
I think this is the missing ingredient that both ourselves and, ironically, Wales (who gave us the bones of our coaching system that became world leading), is a poor coaching development system. Fix that and you start getting players developing basic skills better and earlier in their careers and this feeds through all the way through the system and it also means that, when coaching positions at all levels come up, there are people of quality to fill them, who feed through the system all the way to the top. We could be exporting more coaches to Japan and England and France and the UK and the USA, as we have done a bit in the past.
A lack of a third tier between SR and Club rugby might block this a little - but I am not sure that this alone is the reason - it does give people some opportunity though to be noticed and play a key role in developing that next generation of players coming through. And we have never been able to make the cost sustainable. But if the standard of your coaches at age group level and Shute Shield, Hospitals Cup and John I Dent Cup is higher than you are still going to have better coaches to pick from for the next level up - whether that is a third tier or straight to Super Rugby.
I don't think it matters that we have an OS coach as our head coach at the moment but I think it does tell us something about overall rugby ecosystem that, when a coaching appointment comes up, we don't have 3 or 4 high quality options ready to take over. The failure of our coaching development pathway is a key missing ingredient for me and one of the reasons our systems are failing.
Ok I understand. Give them my number please Nick.
Hopefully Joe stays where he is. That would mean Les, McKellar, larkham and Cron should as well. It’s the stability we need in the state programs. But, if Joe goes, RA with its current financial situation will be forced into promoting from within. And this will likely destabilise other areas.
To better understand some of the entrenched bitterness of those outside of NZ and NSW (as an example 😂), Nic, there is probably a comparison to the old hard heads of welsh rugby who are still stuck in the 1970s. Before the days where clubs merged, professionalism started, and the many sharp knives were put into the backs of those who loved the game more than everyone else. I’m sure you know a few... But given your comparison of rugby in both wales and Australia, there are a few north of the tweed that will never trust a kiwi or NSWelshman because of historical events and issues over the history of the game. It is what it is. For some, time does not heal all wounds. And it is still festering away in some people. Happy holidays to you. All the best in 2025.
It's an interesting stage for RA. This year has been so good for one reason: "sanity." For the most part, things have made sense with JS and RA. The hard thing is that if JS does not renew, the choices that have to be made have to be correct; otherwise, we may as well get Eddie back and have a laugh. No, I'm joking.
JS did have an interview early on after his appointment and mentioned it was not a closed option to continue on, he did say he would see where things were at at that point.
Whatever happens, there seems to be an agreement in this and most articles on the topic that a way has to be found to propagate the seeds Joe has sown.
🤣
Yes the bg word is 'continuity' . Keep Joe on, or Les with Joe helping him as a consultant.
Schmidt has always been hard to lockdown, long-term. His reasons are understandable and it's very impressive that his priorities are his family.
Surely there is scope for a blended, hybrid role now. Remote working/coaching. It's an easier idea post-Lockdown and international rugby isn't usually more than a dozen games per calender year.
It could be huge step backwards for the wallabies if they don't get recruitment right.
Yes I think that is the natural solution B. It's part of the modern world after all and reason rugby cannot accommodate it too.
We know precisely who this Xmas gift was for, Nick. I've got out the red wine, a cigar and have my feet up. Let the fun begin.
It already has DM, but I do think OJ represents a significant strain of Aussie thinking, so it was worth addressing!
Coaching Australia has been a poisoned chalice for several over recent years. The problems that need to be resolved are:-
1. Retention of players & not losing them to other sports.
2. Development of players & coaches.
3. Improve financial status of Australian rugby ( currently parlous ).
4. Win more games than lose.
You can't develop non Tah Australian coaches if you don't ever give them the opportunity. Which is exactly how kiwis and the Tahs want it.
Coach education in the Dick Marks era used to be top-drawer. Now it isn't.
Oh dear
Not my idea of a topic to generate positivity, .... though it should be Nick.
The very reason that this issue unleashes the troglodyte community that forever keeps Rugby Union in the background is the same reason that the coach should come from OS.
How pathetic and narrow minded it is for the 4th ranked football code in the country to be forced to hire an Australian coach.
With the exception of Kiss, local coaches know SFA.
McKenna and Larkham aren't terrible, they just aren't top shelf. They have been moved on by top class outfits after minimal success.
We should be aiming for the very best available if Schmidt moves on.
If the gains made by Schmidt just trickle away, Rugby Union will drop back to being the laughing stock it was under Aussie Eddie, and potentially never recover.
You can't have repeated last chances with a sporting community that is used to excellence in the other sports they follow.
Kepping Schmidt one way or another has to be the only solution. "Coaching Director ", Attack Coach, anything, but keep him.
If he isn't head coach, but still there somehow then the new guy has to the very best available, irrespective of where he comes from.
I think Kiss would be a sensible choice if it is to be an Aussie AD, he has accrued a huge envelope of international experience in SA and Ireland and England. But Joe staying on would have to be the preference....
He knows how to set standards and the players obv respond to that challenge.
Great read on a fascinating topic, Nick. Thanks as always.
My gut feel is that Joe Schmidt won't carry on through to the next RWC. He is at the stage, and age, in his life , that a further two years in a very high pressure coaching job would not be a good thing for either himself or his family. The fact that he remains based in Taupo seems a significant pointer, I would have thought. I believe he has a round trip of 12 hrs driving just to get on a plane to Australia.
Amongst the many good things Joe Schmidt has achieved to this point is that the WB's are now a more enticing prospect to coach going forward.
Tbh, the only Australian coach I would see stepping up and developing the WB's further would be Les Kiss. He has far more in his CV than any other Australian. He now has 23 years of coaching Union,starting with a defence role with the Boks, then back to Australia with the Waratahs. Overseas again for nine years in Ireland, which included 5 years as defence coach with the national team, during which he was interim head coach for two games, both wins. His last years in Ireland were with Ulster, even then a team beginning a decline. So that spell was his least successful. Finally the spell with London Irish, where I felt Kiss was doing very well, till the club collapsed financially.
Of the other Australian options, Dan McKellar has a lot to prove post the year with Leicester. Stephen Larkham has not, in my view, yet shown outstanding qualities as a coach. Nether man has anything close to Kiss's experience. Some may see this as being harsh on both men, ignoring good work they have done. But is how I see it.
Looking outside Australia, I would see Vern Cotter as a strong possibility, if interested. His time with Scotland was outstanding. Ronan O'Gara, I would think, might well be another possibility, though he has no international experience. Jake White ? Maybe .
Kiss was doing very well indeed with Irish but Ulster had other off field issues going on, to say the least!!
Not sure it would be fair to judge McKellar on Leicester, it’s a tough gig with that dressing room and looked more like a poor fit more than anything else.
Would be a shock if O’Gara would touch it, he publicly dismissed Wales recently but covets France, England and Ireland - in that order.
Cotter would be interesting and he’s got qualities but he’s also got some elements of Eddie Jones about him believe it or not - he had the Scotland wc squad in camp, with the French foreign legion and ripping the heads off chickens!
Cheers Miz, and happy Christmas to you and yours!
I agree with just about everything you've said. Schmidt to continue his good work, and if not Joe, then Les...
Nick, if you start Uru then how do you balance that with the leadership that Wilson brings?
He seems to be the best captain we have had in a while, though still not quite the dominant player we need (though his sheer desire and workrate is applauded).
Does McReight have it in him to be thrown in as captain? Can Wilson be the '97 Jason Leonard role?
On the coaching, I hope plan B is to keep Joe involved in any capacity as attack coach and including on the selector couch.
I don't mind the idea of Larkham with Joe in his ear...jeez it would be good to see Brums make a final but he is also the one who coached Wright, Ikitau and Noah into their strongest super seasons after the disappointment of 2023.
I would shift the captaincy to Fraser JM, and send Harry to the bench. In a World Cup format Joe could prob play either of those back fives with some conviction - Skelton-Frost-Uru-Bobby-Fraser, or Williams-Frost-Harry-Bobby-Fraser.
Yes they have to keep Joe involved even if it is in some kind of consultant capacity. They badly need that continuity and I'm sure Les Kiss would not object to Joe perched on his shoulder for a season or so...
The clear and obvious answer here is to keep JS, on whatever terms necessary, beyond the Lions IF he is willing. Why would anyone get rid of a coach that is making clear and obvious progress from a real tricky starting position? Beyond that is where the planning and development needs to be if they have home grown options available.
As always, outsiders can see these things more clearly than ppl on the inside Ed!👍