Rugby: Michael Cheika draws battle lines ahead of Bledisloe opener

Wallabies head Coach Michael Cheika. Photosport

On Sunday, the All Blacks will travel to Sydney for their Bledisloe Cup match the following weekend in the midst of a Spygate court hearing and in the aftermath of what they consider to be a series failure against the British and Irish Lions.

They will also have in their squad, depending on fitness, up to 10 Crusaders players who took part in the recent Super Rugby final against the Lions in Johannesburg and who have spent the following days travelling and celebrating.

They will arrive in a country in which rugby faces an uncertain future, and will be preparing to play a Wallabies team who are determined to throw that back in the faces of their trans-tasman rivals, an attitude quietly stoked by their coach Michael Cheika who might just be more abrasive than usual.

Cheika has an important role to play next week and his messages in the media when referring to Steve Hansen and the All Blacks, while likely to be respectful, might not be too complimentary.

In the wake of the drawn Lions test series, and the emotional roller coaster the Crusaders have been on, Cheika will see opportunities for his team to exploit at ANZ Stadium next Saturday.

He will probably feel, too, that the All Blacks returning to Sydney 12 months after the discovery of a listening device in the team room of their hotel, and the subsequent ongoing trial, will increase the scrutiny on Hansen and the All Blacks while taking it off his own team, who haven't held the Bledisloe Cup since 2003.

His ambivalence towards Hansen is relatively well known and reiterated recently in a podcast with Australian rugby journalists Jamie Pandaram and Iain Payten. It is clear that instilling self-belief into a team drawn from players who have known nothing but failure against New Zealand opposition this year will be his priority.

In the podcast, Cheika didn't deny that relations between the two teams were frosty, and he also paid credit to the way Lions coach Warren Gatland reacted to being portrayed as a clown in a cartoon published by the Herald.

Cheika was similarly illustrated by the Herald last year, something that, bizarrely, he blamed on the All Blacks after the third test at Eden Park in October.

"I would say that's pretty accurate, we're competing against each other, it's not like we're going to be best mates," Cheika said of the teams' dislike of each other.

"My friends are in the Australian team, and we're competing against them.

"I don't think it would be normal to be any other way."

Of the Gatland treatment, he said: "I thought Gatland handled that brilliantly.

"He's a guy who's come back and challenged in his homeland, so they would've wanted to get to him as much as possible and I thought he did it pretty well.

"It's good fun, don't get me wrong. I really enjoy that conflict and that challenge.

"It would be much easier for us, because we've been beaten for many years now for Bledisloe, to cower away and go 'Well we shouldn't say anything or we should be all rosy behind the scenes because we don't have the right to stand up because we've been getting beaten'.

"But I don't believe that. We've got to do our absolute best and be fully accountable for everything that happens on the field but that doesn't mean we can't stand up for ourselves as well.

"I love that stuff, I love being in the firing line.

"We're Australia, they're New Zealand. I don't expect them to like me."

Next week is unlikely to be dull.