Patchwork Wallabies: Can Cheika stitch together a World Cup campaign?

We're starting to get a feel for what the 2019 Wallabies coaching team will look like, but the big question is how will it function in a high-stakes World Cup year?

Michael Cheika survives at the helm, Scott Johnson installed over the top as director of rugby, with Mick Byrne (skills) and Nathan Grey (defence) likely, but not certain, to survive a cull of the assistants.

Something had to give, but there are plenty of people bemused that it was attack coach Stephen Larkham – the man once anointed by Cheika as his successor – who was offered up as the fall guy.

Interesting times ahead: Michael Cheika will have his hands full with a new coaching structure as he begins a World Cup year.Credit:PA

An objective look at the Wallabies' season – 13 Tests, nine losses, half the tries scored this year compared to last – will tell you they were all fair game. The attack was poor, yes. But the defence ran hot and ice cold, the skills were not evident and the set pieces – the lineout in particular – a mess.

But depending on what side of the fence you sat, internally, it was someone else's fault. The defensive system exhausted players, leaving little in the tank on attack. The attack was too structured. There was too much kicking for a team short on strong tactical kickers. And so on. One source told The Sun-Herald that Larkham had barely touched the attack this season.

Which cuts to the heart of the matter. The Wallabies coaching set-up, which had its genesis as a meeting of minds of Australia's top Super Rugby coaches and was the blueprint for Cheika's campaign to build trust between the states, had degenerated into dysfunction. That's no great revelation, in a sense. The team's performances in the Rugby Championship this year told us as much.

How will it work?: Will Michael Cheika welcome Scott Johnson’s contribution?Credit:PA

What is interesting is how Rugby Australia and Cheika will move forward from here. It was surely a pre-emptive move from Johnson to get the message out early that he was not coveting Cheika's role. But while the 56-year-old has worked with interesting characters and is by all accounts an interesting character himself, a constrained Cheika is not a familiar proposition.

Will he accept Johnson's arrival and embrace his potential contribution? Certainly, Cheika has built his career on doing things instinctively and in his own way, rooted in a distrust of the rugby establishment.

Then, there's the assistants. If Larkham does go, who will replace him? Johnson could fill in the gaps, or Cheika. Who will fix the lineout? Surely that's relevant to the team's poor attacking record this year. What's Nathan Sharpe doing?

The changes won't stop there. The RA board's review threw up a number of areas of concern, and Cheika himself nominated some players he felt had not lived up to the team's high behavioural standards, The Sun-Herald has been told. Fitness and conditioning came up for discussion as well, among other areas.

Fall guy: Wallabies assistant coach Stephen Larkham.Credit:Brook Mitchell

The fallout will extend into the boardroom. Chairman Cameron Clyne is under pressure and may not survive next April's annual general meeting. John O'Neill is the name on everyone's lips in Sydney. Clyne has never been interested in longevity, however, and he will not be perturbed by such speculation. If he can leave the organisation in a financially stable position, with a formalised collaborative arrangement between the Super Rugby teams and national set-up and some meat on the bones of the organisation's high-performance structure, he may well declare it job done, no matter the damage to his legacy wrought by the Western Force debacle.

But those are big ifs. The Wallabies coaching dramas have masked the pressing issue of Super Rugby's future, a question that will have a singular bearing on the game going forward in Australia.

And there's the small matter of a World Cup in nine months' time. Castle, denied her wish to focus on a world-class succession plan for the post-Cheika era, has put together a patchwork plan B.

But how does Cheika recover from the damaging speculation the team's results precipitated in the back half of this season? How does the playing group? Many of them are overseas on holiday now, including the coach, but they will have to pitch up for Wallabies duty again in just a few weeks, called into a pre-World Cup camp that will be the first of its kind. Ironically, this was a Cheika proposal. Its staging is a credit to the goodwill he and high-performance boss Ben Whitaker have generated among the Super Rugby teams.

It will take an unheralded display of maturity and selflessness from players and coaches alike to make this sow's ear into a silk purse. Michael Hooper will need to draw on every ounce of his credibility as Test captain to marshal the group behind the new order.

But the Johnson-Cheika arrangement as one big, happy, blended family? That's what they'll take to fans early next week. I'm not buying it just yet.

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