It's hard to know without knowing what his budget was and whether any other stipulations were made on hires (such as being Australian).
Mick Byrne is the only assistant he's had who could be remotely considered world class.
Of course there's a reasonable chance that even with the right budget some of the right people wouldn't have wanted to work for Cheika.
Rugby Australia needs to think long and hard about this issue though. We're clearly not going to have the budget to recruit whoever we want as head coach and then meet their hiring preferences for the assistants. We've got to work out what we need to spend to be competitive though.
Yes.
Two things are for sure: One, RA, the Wallabies, Australian rugby as a whole, simply cannot afford a line of mediocre-to-awful Wallaby continuity from 2008 on that painfully inflects in 2019 and, best case, as trend, does not improve at all, or worst case, deteriorates further downward from 2018's and 2019's lows. There cannot be any more consistent performance down-trend lines and vast annual volatility in Wallaby w-l % terms, there simply
must be some marked improvement in sustained Wallaby outcomes or the code here will be seriously imperilled and there may be no arriving saviour. (It's conceivable that it all maybe too late in any event, too many debacles and, for paying fans and media buyers and other sponsors, just too many now deadened hopes and broken promises.)
Two, all of the the available data from the last decade shows clearly, unambiguously, that the quality of elite coaching in pro rugby really, really, really matters in terms of delivering truly high performance, fan-building, and thus $ income building, team outcomes.
Accordingly RA had better find the funds from its not inconsiderable cash overheads to assemble the very best possible total new coaching team for the Wallabies as it clearly has only one more shot at getting this right, it has blown far too many chances to do so and we are at last chance saloon time, loud and fucking clear.
Finding, and not constraining, these funds - versus the strategically crazy model of 'who can we get for our badly constrained $ budget' - for the right coaching group is a thus a RA crucial priority, perhaps the crucial priority. The Rugby Foundation should wisely cease its quiet subsidisation of strategically ill-considered elite player salary packages and get its outlay priorities onto funding RA's ability to fund and support the very best possible elite rugby coaching group for the Wallabies.
