<blockquote class="ipsBlockquote" data-author="Mick Gold Coast QLD" data-cid="588100" data-time="1465947317">
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These blokes share the background of a demanding apprenticeship and long career with the dominant Club of the pre-professional period. Randwick was the high seminary of the Club rugby religion, where one learned lifelong lessons that excellence and success are borne of unremitting discipline and application.
 
Eddie (56 years old) played 210 games for Randwick from '81 to '91, then went on with his career as a physical education and geography teacher and eventually school principal. He appeared in six grand finals and won four. His coaching career began in '94 (Randwick) and he has been at it all around the world ever since. He played at Randwick with John Maxwell, Simon Poidevin, Lloyd Walker, Tim Kava, Stu Rutherford, David Knox, early David Campese and the Ellas. I watched him trundle about throughout that period, small and 70 kg wringing wet, an ever present workhorse for the whole of every match, always on the ball, dirty, wearing thick ankle pads.
 
He came under the guidance of the master coach, Bob Dwyer, a tremendously influential figure in the game; and of the excellent Club coaches Jeff Sayle and Alan Gaffney. Cheika spent more time with the latter two.
 
Bob Dwyer said of him some years ago "When Eddie came on the scene at Randwick, he came with a group of talented players (the Ellas and Walker all from Matraville High) into a group of talented players. He had exposure to a superior level of performance. What's come of this is his unbelievable appetite for hard work, much to the consternation of those below him." He was academically outstanding and is well summarised as a perfectionist. From Jones:
 
"Ian Chappell certainly influenced my thinking on sport," Jones wrote. "I have been lucky enough to coach a number of teams. I want the teams that I coach to be tough and uncompromising. I want them to play positive rugby. I want our team to play entertaining rugby that sets standards of play. And I want to make sure that our team and team-members are selfless in pursuit of excellence. These attributes are the attributes of Ian Chappell."
 
Like many of his Club team mates he simultaneously studied and left rugby to go straight into an existing professional career. His father is Australian and his mother Japanese.
 
Greg Growden said of him:
 
"Eddie Jones can be difficult to work with. He is so fastidious, so demanding, so clinical, so deeply focused, so work orientated, he can incinerate those around him, especially if they are a bit sensitive. If you don't stand up to him, he can crush you."
 
From Glen Ella, who worked alongside Jones in Japan:
 
"Iâ€d think: â€œDoes this guy ever sleep?â€ Weâ€d go for a coffee for some down-time and heâ€d start tearing up the sugar sachets to create back-lines."
 
I do believe Eddie over-analysed things as Wallaby coach - Matthew Burke said that in the 1990s "we [the Wallabies] had two set moves we used ... now we walk out of team meetings with pages and pages of moves and tactics and analysis". Australian rugby politics brought him down (a given for every Wallaby coach) together with his personal style, abrasive relationship with ARU power brokers (who all kept their jobs) and poor results from the Wallabies (who all kept their jobs). I read he has learned much and mellowed somewhat in the past fifteen years, but not quite to the alarming "every snowflake is unique and special" level, praise be.
 
He once tore into that outstanding flake, your Kwadie, after a typically dismal effort for the Reds at Suncorp earlier in his career, when he knew only accolades and that no fault ever landed at his door. Robbie Deans did the same some years later after a match against Argentina, but in more moderate "Could have done better" terms. The insolent little turd was so inflated by then that it became the catalyst for his sobbing that "That Dins fella is tocix ... ummm ... togsik ... errr ... what my manager wrote here on this bit of paper" which was the catalyst for that coach being given the shunt.
 
Cheika (49 years old) played in 286 games from '85 to '99, as captain from '97 to '99. The Club won eight premierships during that time. He had played Under 21 for Australia and toured Europe with NSW in '97. The middle years of his career, from '89 to '94, were spent playing in Europe. His coaching career commenced in '99 and he has coached continuously since in Europe, Randwick and at the Waratahs. His contemporaries at Randwick were Warwick Waugh, Phil Kearns, Tim Kelaher, later David Campese and Ewen McKenzie; and the No 8 mantle was passed from John Maxwell, one of the hardest, toughest Club men to play the game. One needed to be seriously good at the job to play in the Randwick forward pack, they were the standard by which others were measured - every man a confident, capable worker, mean, competitive and no bludgers, hunting as a single unit of automatons and, when injured, replaced by a second grader forged from the same steel.
 
Cheika was of the provocative mongrel type, combative, vigorous, able, always gobbing off, pushing the laws and pressing the referee.
 
He enjoyed a blessed family upbringing. His late father had arrived as a typical post war migrant in 1950, dirt poor. His only contact was a Lebanese fruit shop owner, the father of Aussie Home Loans founder John Symond. He ended up with his own trading company working in foreign and Australian goods; an MBE for services to the Lebanese community and Lebanese Australian of the Year.
 
Michael Cheika was driven, ambitious and disciplined enough to forge his own way in the "rag trade" in Europe - and to become fluent in two more languages along the way (now he is studying Portugese, to bring his score to five) - and made his fortune when he sold his fashion distribution company. (Cheika's background, nature, manner and wider family success replicates that of one of my sons in law in building construction, whose family village is the next one along, five miles from Cheika's in the mountains near the Syrian border).
 
The media has been trying hard to talk up something which is unlikely to exist - Jones and Cheika are seven years apart in age, their Club careers overlapped by seven years but Jones was from the old guard. He was from Matraville High, public housing territory, and Cheika from Marcellan (Catholic) College - different cradles - and they lived in different parts of the district, Cheika among his Lebanese family milieu. When they ceased playing they went their quite different, separate ways. I doubt they were close and they certainly don't have any particular rivalry, as claimed by the scribes.
 
I have seen Eddie described as a "larrikin", which he certainly was not, and both as being unlucky to have not played for Australia. The journalists just make stuff up.
 
With Randwick and Bob Dwyer as benefactors they would have played if they were good enough but they were not. There is no shame in that, they attained the highest level of which they were capable. Their experience mirrors that of League's greatest coaches - Warren Ryan, Jack Gibson and Wayne Bennett were competent club footballers who only got a sniff of State representation.
 
I have great respect for both of these fellows, faithful servants to rugby that they are. I believe Michael Cheika will succeed, not least because he put the ARU back in its box (when they needed him more than he needed them) and he enjoys the protection of the most powerful political faction in Sydney rugby. He needs to be around for some years to to do that. Eddie Jones will do well with England however he has seen his best days already and I donâ€t think his obsessive, demanding methods will sit well with modern player expectations into the future. Cheika is the modern coach.
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I just wanted to say awesome post, the sort of reason this forum is the best rugby one out there. Fantastic from a Northern Hemisphere perspective to hear this kind of insight from Aus - I recently read an article on Jones from a BBC journo who had interviewed some of his old Randwick and Wallabies mates, but this shits all over it.
 
(Please tell me you didn't just copy-paste from somewhere!)

SimonAdd

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