I also note MST's comment elsewhere that the Brumbies are yet to announce HC going forward. Odd.
dru, the most ludicrous aspect of all this was the media feed the ARU put out around 6 weeks or so ago that 'Larkham has to - over time - make up his mind between HC of the Brums and full-time Assistant Coach at the Wallabies'.
As if this guy was a proven star coach and just has the rugby world at his feet with elite coaching options that he must soon deign to select from!
He's proven little more - in any senior coaching role - than the cubed root of fuck-all! His contribution to the 2016 Wallabies is..........invisible. And yet he's being indulged by the ARU and ACTRU with the allowance to take any position he deems best for his interests.
The whole thing is laughable, it's all wrapped up in our lost, dreamy nostalgia for 'the golden years'. 'He was such a wonderful player'. Sooner or later we will have to start living in the now and figure out how we are going to build some more golden years.
Even worse, and somewhat contradictory at that, was to come when B Pulver stated a few months back that, when dealing with media inquiries re the issue of part-time Wallaby coaches, 'we hope to have a full-time Wallaby coaching team in place well before RWC 2019'.
I have long been convinced that the current ARU board and CEO simply have no idea just how fundamentally important is the right quantity and quality of specialist, elite national support coaches in their respective fields of proven competency. They just do not have the collective strategic intellect or the required analytical resources. Consequently they consider a good HC with a part-time assistant or two enough of a capability to somehow compete with Tier 1 teams as they are today, whilst we languish in the competitive standards of eras now long passed.
We see with utter clarity the extent of the NZRU's national specialist coaching depth and breadth and how critical it is for everything they output in terms of rugby product quality, we see the massive, rapid skills and rugby smarts improvement EJ (Eddie Jones) induced into England via a wholly new coaching group of considerable size (and even then he consulted further coaching specialists here in Australia), we see all this and yet we implicitly deem we can be the exception, the team that doesn't need to equate with the best in these other national rugby coaching teams, as we are Australia and we have Micheal Cheika, that will have to do.
Meanwhile, as we sit motionless and inactive (.......'a full-time coaching team by 2019'.......), and patiently awaiting the career preferences of a Larkham, the best of the Tier 1s move on aggressively, and are getting better. Is it any wonder we are falling behind the managerial pace, falling behind in player skill development, and falling behind in results, income, sponsors and crowds?