Someone has to pay for the mess Australian Rugby finds itself in, and chairman Hamish McLennan will probably be the one. But his captain’s picks of Eddie Jones and Joseph Suaalii were celebrated at the time.
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When it comes to Hamish McLennan and all the bitter criticism the Rugby Australia chairman has endured since the Wallabies’ World Cup catastrophe, I get it. With an Australian performance that shocking – beaten by Fiji, thumped by Wales, heading for the airport while others headed to the quarter-finals –
someone has to pay the piper.
As one who was among the Australian rugby community for the duration of that World Cup, the pain among us was visceral, and the desire for accountability simply overwhelming.
Who bears overall responsibility for this?
Who sacked Dave Rennie?
Who appointed Eddie Jones?
All three answers come up trumps for ...
Hamish McLennan.
And from that moment, on the fourth card turned over was always likely to be the ace of spades on his chairmanship.
I repeat: I get it. And I frankly think that with the
states seemingly united in revolt, it will be all but impossible for him to hold on. But let’s look at it anyway. In their joint letter, the states put themselves down as ropeable over the Wallabies’ performances as well as finance and governance issues, the last two of which are broadly beyond my ken.
For what it’s worth, I thought the TV deal secured at a time Australian rugby had been so long on the bones of its arse that there were grooves in our wooden chair was extraordinary – as were some of the sponsorship deals the code was able to attract.
I thought
slashing costs by a reported $31 million in the first year, and going from a $25 million loss inherited by McLennan and his board to
an $8 million profit three years later, a pretty fair effort. But as to the nitty-gritty of all that, I have no clue. If those figures don’t stack up, the states will have even more ammunition to fire at him.
As to governance issues? My eyes glaze over. The chairs of those states will have far more knowledge of that than me, and in the extraordinary general meeting they are calling for and RA are obliged to hold, it will be interesting to see what they have got. If McLennan has gone beyond his charter, his position will be even
more untenable.
But in the end, it ain’t governance or finances that are driving this. After the Wallabies’ catastrophic performance in France, the principal torpedo coming McLennan’s way will bear footage of him being front and centre over the appointment of Eddie Jones. Another missile will show McLennan preening over the $5 million contract to lure Roosters winger Joseph Suaalii to rugby.
That much is clear from the states’ joint statement:
“During the past 12 months, Mr McLennan has made a series of calls that have harmed the standing and reputation of our game and led us to question his judgement and his understanding of high-performance sport. His decisions and ‘captain’s picks’ have directly led to an historic failure at the men’s Rugby World Cup and a Wallabies international ranking at an historic low, with all of the regrettable and public fallout that came with it.”
Translation:
Eddie. Eddie. Eddie. (Joseph Suaalii, too.)
Did the recruitment of Jones prove to be a catastrophic mistake?
Absolutely no doubt about it. As I have noted before, if you had to write a script for Eddie completely botching the whole thing, Dr Evil himself could not have done worse. Everything, and I mean everything, was done wrong, from leaving behind key players to pissing off the press, to constantly saying we were going to win the whole thing only to dish up consistently diabolical football.
Was any of this apparent at the time Eddie was appointed? I remember a muted outcry at the sacking of Rennie by the Australian rugby community, but no more than that. Most people – including, I suspect, most of the signatories of that letter – were like me: this is bloody brutal on Rennie, but a brilliant move to get Eddie Jones who, as I have also said many times, had a resume as a high performing coach of World Cup teams second to none.
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The fact that he was suddenly available, and they got him, looked at the time like a classic “disrupting” move, as I gather they call it in business circles. You overturn the whole card table and everyone is pissed off, but when you start again you are so much stronger than before.
It was obviously madness to appoint Jones for five years, and I said so at the time. But it ultimately wasn’t about getting performance in five years. It was about getting performance this year. And at the time, no-one – and I mean no-one looked more likely to get a big performance out of the Wallabies this year than the human cattle-prod, Eddie Jones.
How it turned out so badly, how an Eddie Jones-coached team could play so catastrophically, is still a mystery to me – and I covered every match they played.
I have as much sympathy for the state chairs and their joint letter as I do for Mclennan. Just like him, they are good rugby people, doing their absolute best to find answers, to sort their way out of this morass. I completely understand their desire for accountability, starting with McLennan, and in the end I reckon he’ll go.
We’ll see what the states have got on governance and finances. But ultimately, the reason McLennan will go is because of how Eddie Jones performed at this World Cup. And while there might be some serious rugby identities who foresaw it, and publicly predicted it, I can’t think of any right now.
McLennan will go, but the starting point of his critics can’t be that “It was always obvious that Eddie Jones was going to be a catastrophic appointment.” Because that is simply not the case, and none, if any, said it at the time.
