After Australia were thrashed 33-7 by South Africa in the Rugby Championship 10 days ago Joe Schmidt appeared at the post-match press conference alongside the startled Wallabies captain Allan Alaalatoa. As is often the case, the first question was an underhand serve just to get the ball over the net. Schmidt’s answer lasted a minute and 39 seconds.
Schmidt’s review meetings are famously detailed and blunt and sitting there with an expressionless face Alaalatoa knew that this was just the trailer for the movie. In his breathless response the new Australia coach rolled out his hot takes and in the process he touched on every theatre of combat; there was no good news to report.
When he took over in January Australia were at their lowest point in decades. In the World Cup they had failed to come out of their pool and had been humiliated, 40-6, by Wales. The crackpot appointment of Eddie Jones as coach, just eight months before the tournament began, had backfired spectacularly.
Eighteen months out from a Lions tour, as it was then, and less than four years from a home World Cup, the challenges were obvious and overbearing. In every respect – player pathways, public support, funding – Australian rugby was a shambles. The team was a rabble.
Schmidt achieved so much success with Ireland, though, that it is easy to forget the mess he inherited here too. Australia were ranked at number nine in the world when he took the reins, just as Ireland were in 2013 – two places behind Samoa. Ireland had won just one match in that year’s Six Nations and lost to Italy in Rome in Declan Kidney’s last game as head coach.
That season Leinster had failed to reach the quarter-finals of the Heineken Cup despite having won the previous two competitions under Schmidt’s leadership. Ulster and Munster had both come up short in the knock-out rounds.
In Schmidt’s second match as coach Australia destroyed Ireland at Lansdowne Road, four tries to nil and 32-15. Allowing for inflation, that would be more than a 17-point defeat now. “Ireland were beaten out the gate by a Wallabies side that were superior in every single department,” wrote Gerry Thornley on these pages. “As reality checks go, this was pretty sobering.”
“I would implore the public to hang in there,” said Schmidt in his post-match press conference.
It will be fascinating to see how he manages this challenge. By the time Schmidt finished with Ireland at the 2019 World Cup his heavily prescriptive approach had hit a spiral of diminishing returns. But by then he had galvanised an exceptional generation of Irish players, leading them to a Grand Slam, three Six Nations titles, our first Test victories over New Zealand and to number one in the world rankings.
There is no suggestion, though, that Schmidt has that kind of material at his disposal in Australia, or anything remotely like it. Under Jones, in 2023, Australia won just two games out of nine, both against tier two nations, Portugal and Georgia.
When Schmidt named his first training squad in July there were more debutants than at any time in the professional era. He also named Australia’s seventh different captain in the previous 12 months. That degree of flux is tantamount to chaos.
When they played Wales recently there were just five survivors from their World Cup meeting last autumn. Australia won both Tests on Wales’ short tour, but Welsh rugby is the other basket case among the tier one nations. In old money, this was the meeting of tuppence and tuppence ha’penny.
In his last five coaching roles – with Clermont Auvergne, Leinster, Ireland, Blues and New Zealand – Schmidt knew that material existed to create success. In Australia, clearly, the opposite is true. With great coaches you always wonder where the tipping points are. What portion of a team’s success can be attributed to them; what portion is attributable to the players in their dressingroom?
That separation may be impossible – like trying to recover milk from your tea – but it never stopped people from speculating. It was often said of Mick O’Dwyer and Brian Cody, for example, “that anybody would have won All-Irelands with those players”. In both cases, such a claim was fatuous.
O’Dwyer and Cody were both innovators, in different ways, and altered the landscape of their sports. Managing talented players is a skill too. In O’Dwyer’s case, though, his nomadic existence as a coach took him to other dressingrooms where great players were scarce or non-existent and you could argue that what he achieved in Kildare and Laois, and to some extent Wicklow, franked his greatness almost as much as everything he did with Kerry.
Carlo Ancelotti’s strange interlude with Everton in an interesting test case too. He arrived midway through the 2019-20 season and left at the end of the following season. At one point in his second campaign Everton were fourth in the table, but they finished in 10th, having ended the previous season in 12th.
By unflattering comparison his direct predecessors in the job – Marco Silva and Sam Allardyce – had both steered Everton to league finishes in the top half of the table. Ancelotti’s overall win-rate, though, in all competitions, was better than any permanent Everton manager since the glory days of Howard Kendall in the mid-1980s.
Ancelotti’s greatness as a manager doesn’t require any witness testimony from Everton – among a career haul of 29 major trophies he has the won league titles in five different countries and five Champions League titles, a unique distinction.
But Everton showed another side to his talent. Ancelotti’s special power is managing dressingrooms full of great players and outsized egos. At Everton, he didn’t face that challenge.
South Africa made 10 changes for their second Rugby Championship match against Australia on Saturday and still won by 18 points. Australia stayed in the game for longer but in the pelting rain weaknesses in their basic skills were exposed again. This is a team that needs the shelter of good structure and sound fundamentals. Schmidt has demonstrated repeatedly that he can provide that service.
Can he improve them in time to rescue what promises to be a farcical Lions tour next summer? This is the biggest challenge of his career.
