The easy part for the ARU in getting out of the present crisis was getting rid of the Wallabies coach Eddie Jones. The hard part comes now.
The ARU must get every major decision right in constructing a coaching and management team for the Wallabies that will return the national side to the position of leadership, on and off the field, it enjoyed in 2001 when Jones took over from Rod Macqueen.
There is no evidence so far, unfortunately, that the present ARU board is capable of making a series of difficult and correct decisions. In fact, since the board forced out its chief executive John O'Neill, rather than discipline Eddie Jones and George Gregan, it has lurched from one crisis to another.
This is not an argument for the ARU board second-guessing the new Wallabies coach on every decision that is made. The coach should be given all the resources he needs to create a successful squad. O'Neill did this for Macqueen and the result, less than two years after possibly the worst performance ever by a Wallabies side in its capitulation in South Africa, was the 1999 Rugby World Cup victory. Thirteen players on the field of shame in Pretoria were in that 1999 championship side.
Coaching does make a difference. It is not good enough for Jones's sympathisers to argue that "the players aren't there". The players are there and the new coach has to find them and develop them into top-class Test players. This is why Ewen McKenzie is the best candidate to replace Jones.
n McKenzie's first year with the NSW Waratahs they performed dismally, finishing seventh - a worse position than the year before. This season, however, McKenzie got the Waratahs into the Super 12 final.More importantly, except for the final against the Crusaders, the Waratahs were well-organised in the set pieces and expansive in their back play. This is the formula for winning Tests. McKenzie knows this from being the assistant in more than 50 Tests to the most successful Wallabies coach ever, Macqueen.
Under McKenzie this year, too, players like Peter Hewat (how was Wendell Sailor ever preferred ahead of the intercept expert and prolific point-scorer Hewat?), Lachlan McKay, Lote Tuqiri and Daniel Vickerman (the best Australian second-rower since John Eales) have developed their games significantly. The sign of a good coach is that players play well and improve under his coaching regime.
The ARU should construct a coaching "dream team" along the lines of that in place with the All Blacks.
There are any number of experts who could support McKenzie. Alec Evans was the forwards coach in 1984 when the Wallabies scrum famously achieved a pushover try against Wales in Cardiff. Andrew Blades knows everything about tight-five play. Pat Howard and Rod Kafer have an expertise about modern back play. David Nucifora and John Connolly have impressive coaching records. The point is, the ARU must never again allow a coach to become, in effect, a one-man band answerable, it seems, only to himself, as Jones became.
There are a number of candidates who could act as a selector and mentor to the Australian coaches and players in the same way that Brian Lochore, the former All Blacks captain and coach, does for New Zealand. Macqueen, though, would be the ideal person for the job if he were prepared to take it.
During the Eddie Jones years, there was, in my view, a lack of understanding that playing for and coaching the Wallabies is a sacred trust. It is not just a job. The Wallabies are a national treasure, a construct of Australian society and culture, and the passion of all the hundreds of thousands of rugby players and supporters.
Macqueen, by reviving a tradition of former Wallabies handing out the Test jerseys and by taking his players to the First World War battlefields, understood the spirit of the Wallabies. If the next coach and his staff have a similar understanding, all will be well for the Wallabies' future.
