The most important matter of business to settle ahead of a Test between Australia and Argentina in Sydney these days is which team will claim Coogee Oval.
Now, the Emerald City isn’t short of picturesque training bases. England made Manly their home in the pre-Eddie Jones days, while the All Blacks enjoyed the leafy-luxe vibe of Double Bay, until the infamous spy-gate saga soured things on their head.
Read the Official Wallabies v Argentina Test Program here!
The Wallabies favoured inner-city locales for a period under former coaches Robbie Deans and Ewen McKenzie.
But Coogee has been the centre of the universe for the Wallabies and touring squads for almost a decade now, coveted by two coaches who consider it their home turf, no matter which team they’re managing.
We’re talking about Jones and Michael Cheika, of course. Both of them raised in Sydney’s eastern and southern suburbs and both products of storied club, Randwick.
“It’s astonishing, really, they’re coaches of two of the top nations in world Rugby, and they both come from the one background,” former Wallabies coach and Randwick stalwart Bob Dwyer says.
“They’ve provided a few over the years, mind you. Six Wallabies coaches, one assistant coach and eight captains.”
But back to the battle for Coogee.
In 2016, when Jones was newly in charge of England and Cheika coached the Wallabies, the former made a pointed early strike by booking his team into the Crowne Plaza and leaning on his Randwick connections to secure the oval for training.
He also hired Glen Ella as skills coach. The jolting sight of the former Wallaby and Randwick back in an England training tracksuit on Coogee Oval was almost as damaging to Australia’s campaign that year as Jones’s ‘Bodyline Rugby’ call to arms for the England squad.
Cheika’s Wallabies were the locals, we had to remind ourselves. Jones was coaching the enemy. England won the series three-nil.
The wily hooker, who Dwyer describes as the most determined character he’s ever met, used Coogee again in 2022, convincing Randwick City Council to let England train on the oval despite recent heavy rains.
This time the Wallabies under Cheika’s successor, Dave Rennie, were happy to mount their campaign from training camps on Queensland’s Gold and Sunshine Coasts.
Australia won the first Test in Perth but Jones’s England took the series. Sections of the Sydney Cricket Ground crowd erupted in hostility towards the expatriate coach.
But in Coogee, Jones felt at home.
One year later, the beachside village has lost none of its appeal.
Cheika, now the outsider, claimed its symbolic power for Argentina this week. Jones, born again as Wallabies coach, trained Australia on Manly Oval on Sydney’s northern beaches. It was the latest mini-battle between the Randwick stablemates and fierce rivals, who will have coached against each other in three different permutations by the time the whistle blows at CommBank Stadium on Saturday night.
Australia vs England: Cheika 0, Jones 7. Argentina vs England: Cheika 1, Jones 0. Argentina vs Australia: TBC.
“They’ll both be desperately keen to win, to beat their mate,” Dwyer says of the match-up.
“You wouldn’t say they’re close mates but you could definitely say they’re mates. Nobody is more intense than Eddie. Being less intense than Eddie doesn’t put you in the carefree bracket, necessarily.”
No, it doesn’t. No one has ever described any top coach as carefree, least of all Cheika, but in the pantheon of Test coaching characters, both men sit apart.
They each possess a larrikin streak doubtlessly honed during their years in the myrtle green of the Randwick District Rugby Union Football Club.
Their direct styles, softened by a distinctly Australian jocularity, have been the keys to their success.
There are plain differences, too. Cheika has found a natural home in the Latino intensity of Argentinian Rugby, while Jones’s temperament has been most at home in Japan and England, where the steel he cultivates within his squads is a prized national trait.
A seven-year age gap has lent an air of big brother-little brother to the dynamic over the years.
Cheika played and coached in Europe while Jones climbed the ranks in Australian Rugby, coaching the Brumbies to Super Rugby success before taking over the Wallabies in 2001.
For a short time, they were in the same place. Cheika returned to Australia to be close to his father, who was ill, the same year Jones took over from Rod Macqueen.
He was in residence at Coogee Oval and Latham Park, as Randwick’s first grade coach, for the entire time Jones was coaching the Wallabies.
Australia lost the home Rugby World Cup final to England in 2003 and the following year Cheika’s Randwick won the Shute Shield. History tells us it was the final stand in Australian Rugby’s golden era.
Jones was sacked as Wallabies coach in 2005. The same year, Cheika accepted a deal to coach Irish super-province Leinster.
Their careers continued to wax and wane, but by the time Cheika returned to coach the Waratahs in 2013, a Heineken Cup title headlining his CV, Jones was long gone.
Both men responded to failure in their careers with trademark character, eventually.
For Jones, his acrimonious exit from the Wallabies and Queensland galvanised his fighting spirit. He gathered himself in Japan’s club system and re-launched his international career as an adviser to the World Cup-winning Springboks two years later.
As Japan coach he led the Brave Blossoms to their watershed victory over South Africa at the 2015 World Cup.
Cheika was at that tournament too, fresh off a Super Rugby title with NSW, and in his first year as Wallabies coach. Twelve years after Jones coached Australia to a RWC final, Cheika did the same. Success eluded them both.
That tournament would come to represent turning points for both men in their careers.
Cheika’s Wallabies never reached those heights again, while the so-called “Brighton Miracle” was the start of Jones’s international resurrection.
Just seven months later they were sitting in opposing coaches boxes for the first time.
Jones had brazenly claimed Coogee for England and was about to dish up a lesson for his less experienced counterpart in gamesmanship and tactics.
For Jones it was less about Cheika than the organisation that had cast him out a decade earlier, but it was a humbling experience for the proudly combative former No.8, nevertheless.
Cheika’s Wallabies played Jones’s England four more times after that 2016 series, without a single win.
Three crushing losses at Twickenham in northern hemisphere autumns and a World Cup quarter-final encounter on neutral ground in 2019.
Jones’s rampant England bludgeoned Australia to confirm the end of Cheika’s spell with the Wallabies.
It took the younger ‘brother’ in this scenario a further three years, some soul-searching and a couple of changes of job titles to get one over the older sibling.
But success came eventually, in the form of a 29-30 win for Argentina over England at Twickenham in November last year.
Jones’s time with England would end a few weeks later, setting up the conditions for his second stint in charge of the Wallabies and the ninth clash between the pair.
It would be a disservice to Cheika to characterise the clash as master vs apprentice, but there is no doubt Jones is the more experienced coach.
To invoke the language of the Galloping Greens, Sydney plays host to two stallions in a battle for supremacy this weekend. Can the reigning alpha male of the Australian Rugby herd fend off his younger rival, and good mate, to inject some momentum in the Wallabies World Cup year campaign?
Or does Cheika’s early strike to claim Coogee signal a changing of the guard?
“Cheik has always been a very determined person and very good at what he does. He’s worked and observed and studied and he’s always got better,” Dwyer says.
“I always felt in my own career, I knew more and got better the older and more experienced that I was. There’s a lot of emotion around, early in the piece, and as you age the emotion gets a bit more under control and, as you see more, that expands your horizons.
“That’s where Eddie is. He’s always gotten better and he’s always had tons of courage.”
