Rugby Australia’s credibility rests on a meeting next week between Eddie Jones and Wallabies assistant coach Dan McKellar.
The pair have spoken a couple of times since Jones’s sensational hiring and the returning Australian is hopeful he can retain McKellar on his staff. Like his predecessor Dave Rennie, Jones views the former Brumbies coach as his eventual replacement and plans to mentor him as he did Steve Borthwick, who is now in charge of England.
Unlike Scott Wisemantel, who has ruled out a reunion with Jones, according to sources close to the Wallabies, McKellar is likely to stay on for this year. But next week’s face-to-face will seal the deal.
If McKellar stays, it will be an important vote of confidence in Jones’s regime and, therefore, the governing body under the stewardship of chairman Hamish McLennan.
It would also be a smart move for McKellar, who has the chance to not only see through the four-year project he started with Rennie and the players but also go to his first World Cup as the right-hand man to a veteran of no less than five of those pinnacle tournaments.
But McLennan and RA need McKellar to stay put to prove that building a sustainable, successful code is not just lip service. That they are capable of quiet, considered moves as well as big, brash plays.
As Ned Hanigan said on Wednesday, jaws “hit the ground” when McLennan bared his teeth and sacked Rennie last week. The RA chair has a ruthless streak well known to those who have dealt with him in the business world – you don’t get the nickname “The Hammer” for nothing – but had not had cause to indulge it in his rugby role until last month, when the RFU lost faith in Jones.
It was the right call, based on Rennie’s results and Jones’s record, but it has left many gobsmacked and mistrustful of head office, especially in Queensland, but also within the Wallabies and among large sections of supporters.
It will also have knock-on effects which McLennan should be aware of and look to counter. McKellar has just watched a good coach and close working associate be summarily dismissed and must now ask himself whether any of it was true: the succession plan he was sold when he left the Brumbies to go all-in with Rennie’s Wallabies, and the succession plan Jones is selling him now.
The smart move would be to find McKellar his next role now. He is off contract at the end of the year and will have little appetite to start a second term as an assistant coach. If he is not one of the top two candidates to replace Brad Thorn at the Reds, along with new assistant coach Mick Heenan, from Brisbane club rugby, then Queensland Rugby’s famous parochialism is not serving its fans.
Dan McKellar was heir apparent to Dave Rennie, until Eddie Jones was sacked by the RFU.Credit:Andrew Phan/Wallabies Media
McKellar grew up in regional Queensland, played junior rugby league with Shane Webcke and played alongside the likes of Toutai Kefu, Mark Connors, Garrick Morgan and Shane Drahm at Souths. He and wife Carla have been back living in Brisbane for two years. Before he took the chance to coach club rugby in Canberra, which thrust him into the orbit of the Brumbies and Laurie Fisher, McKellar was as Queensland as the XXXX sign that blinks at Suncorp Stadium.
He is a younger Eddie in a truer likeness than Michael Cheika, who has often been compared with his former Randwick teammate. Where Cheika relies heavily on emotion and instinct in his coaching, McKellar has a more Jones-like steeliness about him. Clinical, fastidious, unrelenting. Like a younger Jones, there are questions about whether he has developed the self-awareness to temper the toughest aspects of his coaching persona.
Along with returned Brumbies coach Stephen Larkham, McKellar is the most credentialed coach in Australian rugby. It would be a bad look if RA could not retain him beyond the end of this year. It would also be very Australian rugby, but hope springs eternal that the organisation can learn from the mistakes of decades past, which saw the country’s coach development program neglected to the point of obsolescence.
McLennan has made endless commentary about restoring rugby to its former glory. He has secured the 2027 World Cup, a solid broadcast deal with Nine, dealt with New Zealand Rugby’s hubris over Super Rugby Pacific and repatriated the country’s most successful rugby export in Jones.
Even his critics must acknowledge he’s made a hell of a start, in a landscape far more challenging than the one in which rugby carved out its first golden era.
But if quality coaches such as Dan McKellar, Brad Thorn and Force coach Simon Cron find themselves at career dead-ends because sexier options keep materialising, then McLennan will find it harder to laugh off the “ruthless ad man” characterisations and Australian rugby will be doomed to its familiar cycle of churn and burn.
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