Making the Wallabies great again: Inside Rugby Australia’s master plan

Eddie Jones (left) greets Australia scrum-half Nic White during England's tour Down Under. Photo / Getty

After 20 years of All Blacks domination, the Bledisloe Cup has struggled to engage fans the way it once did. Since 2003 when the Wallabies last held the cup, Australia have dropped in the world rankings, become the smallest football code in their own backyard and been annually humiliated by their old foe. But Rugby Australia now has three key figures in its midst who have a plan to topple the All Blacks and make the Wallabies great again. Gregor Paul reports.

Hamish McLennan and Eddie Jones, and now Phil Waugh, too, are going to make the Wallabies great again.

This is the election promise, the mantra by which the three men who occupy the holy trinity positions of Rugby Australia chair, chief executive and head coach of the Wallabies are now using to guide their every move.

Maybe it won’t happen this year, probably not next either, but by 2027, the Wallabies hope to be heading into a World Cup which they are hosting as a genuine prospect to win it.

They want the Bledisloe Cup back as well and, maybe most important, they want New Zealanders to lose the pity-filled smugness that is the automatic response these days to any bold claims the Wallabies make about their readiness to beat the All Blacks.

Jones gave an inkling of that when he named a much-changed team to face the All Blacks this Saturday and was asked by TVNZ whether the Wallabies could justify their confidence: “There’s nothing better than Australian rugby taking on New Zealand rugby, because the New Zealanders all think they’re better than us,” said Jones.

“They always have. Can we put the Kiwis under pressure on Saturday? Yes, under a lot of pressure, and maybe they’re going to get a bit of a surprise.

“I can see the way you’re sitting here thinking ‘what is this bloke talking about? How can that Australian team take on New Zealand? We’ve been fantastic the first two games.’

“And you have been mate, you’ve been really fantastic, so you haven’t changed, you’re still fans with keyboards, so nothing’s changed.”

This kind of bravado is nothing new, however. Plenty of Jones’s predecessors have sat in the same seat for the last 20 years and made similarly bold claims that have never materialised.

That New Zealanders do think they are better and that they have become immune to Wallaby coaches promising to unleash hell is maybe not surprising when the statistics are considered.

Since the All Blacks took back the Bledisloe Cup in 2003, they have beaten Australia 44 times, lost nine and drawn three and so New Zealanders can ask why they shouldn’t dismiss McLennan, Jones and Waugh as yet another executive trio who will inevitably be forced out of office soon enough having failed to breathe life back into the Bledisloe.

Wallabies head coach Eddie Jones during a training session. Photo / Photosport

But there is something about this trio – their collective experience, drive, commitment, and unity that suggests that maybe they are different, and they really can make the Wallabies great again.

Also, they have a plan – one that Jones hinted at when he said that the beauty of beating New Zealand is that the effect is so profound that it damages the economy.

“The Prime Minister is there with his fingers crossed hoping the All Blacks win because he knows the economy will drop if they lose,” said Jones.

“So we can have that effect and at the same time Australian kids want to play rugby again. At the moment too many want to play AFL.”

And it’s that last point about too many kids wanting to play AFL and indeed NRL that is critical, because perhaps now, after 20 years of poorly focused administration, Australia has a long-term vision and the necessary strength and acumen in its leadership to rebuild its high-performance system and refinance its community game.

With the Wallabies having won World Cups in 1991 and 1999 and then reaching the final in 2003 when the tournament was in Australia, rugby was well-placed to compete in the competitive football-code market.

But Rugby Australia, perhaps complacently rather than incompetently, signed broadcast deals that were pay-TV only and lost market share of the audience to the AFL and NRL who both worked hard to get their content on free to air.

So too was rugby slow to realise that the AFL and NRL were aggressively targeting young rugby players.

The best athletes were pulled into the AFL and NRL and rugby fell into a vicious cycle where it couldn’t command the same broadcast revenues as its rival codes and couldn’t stop its young players transferring to them either.

McLennan, whose managerial teeth were cut in Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, is a corporate heavyweight used to the rough and tumble of Australia’s more aggressive and demanding business culture.

He has brought a fighter’s mindset to his role as chair, which hasn’t made him popular with his New Zealand counterparts but has been instrumental in putting Rugby Australia on a better path.

From suffering a $27 million loss in 2021, RA posted a profit of $8m in 2022 and is thought to be close to agreeing a private equity deal that will see another $100m-plus injected into the game.

Where McLennan’s presence is likely to be more keenly felt again is when RA comes to renegotiate a broadcast deal for the period after 2025.

The current deal, negotiated before he arrived, saw RA take a catastrophic cut in income from $57m a year to $29m, and has been primarily responsible for the organisation having to live under a regime of austerity these past few years.

Having managed to persuade NZR to give RA $7m of its broadcast income this year, McLennan clearly knows the art of the deal and with his connections into the media world, confidence is high he’ll negotiate a vastly improved content rights deal that will be transformational for the balance sheet.

He’s backing himself to come up with the money, and for Waugh, who was appointed chief executive last month, to use it to rebuild broken development pathways which are best illustrated by the number of NRL stars who at some point earlier in their careers were involved in rugby.

The likes of Cameron Murray, Angus Crichton and Kayln Ponga were all in rugby’s system before the NRL snaffled them.

Jones has been tasked with bringing test victories and making the Wallabies a greater source of aspiration.

“It won’t happen overnight,” says McLennan of his plan to make the Wallabies great again.

“We make no excuses for where we are at, but it is a complete rebuild. I have absolute faith in Phil Waugh and Eddie Jones to rebuild our structures and pathways. And there is a strong buzz building in Australia.”

When Jones was coaching England between 2016 and 2022, he said that the English private schools, which continue to be the most prolific suppliers of the country’s rugby talent, were producing young men who lacked resilience and leadership.

It was a comment that sat uncomfortably with his employer at the time and may have been instrumental in getting him fired, but it’s his desire to produce tougher, more belligerent characters who want to fight to the death that won him his second stint as Wallabies coach.

McLennan, who recently bought a $30m house in Sydney’s trophy home belt on Darling Point, knows that the situation in Australia is not too dissimilar to England.

Rugby is a game of wealth and privilege, and Australia’s elite schools are just as guilty of producing entitled sorts who know there is a trust fund waiting.

Jones is not from privilege and having grown up on the wrong sides of the tracks with a Japanese heritage, he’s had to fight for everything: acceptance, recognition, and respect.

And this is why McLennan snapped up Jones when he became available earlier this year.

He wants Jones to teach the Wallabies what it takes to win consistently, to find the same sort of ruthlessness that the All Blacks have had these last 20 years, and that’s why the Bledisloe Cup is such an important part of Australia’s developmental plan.

Eddie Jones. Photo / Photosport

There is no better way to toughen the Wallabies than to expose them to New Zealand and while McLennan agrees that 20 years of defeats and occasional humiliations has made it hard for the Australian rugby public to believe in their team, the only way to win back that support is by winning the Bledisloe.

“Winning a Bledisloe falls only a tad short behind winning the World Cup,” says McLennan.

“It is of paramount importance and every rugby fan in Australia wants it to happen. A big part of my personal motivation is the desire for us to win a Bledisloe.

“We haven’t been good enough and we have to be tougher so good on the Kiwis for creating such a legacy.

“But we will get it back at some point. For what it is worth we have identified the problems in our system, and we have taken steps to rectify them which will lead to better performance and success breeds success.”

As much as McLennan wants the Wallabies to prove they are great again by winning back the Bledisloe, he’s not going to make the same mistake his predecessors made of overexposing the series.

Between 2008 and 2010, the Bledisloe was a four-test series, and then between 2012 and 2019, except for World Cup years, it was a three-test programme.

The expansion was driven by commercial desires, with both countries, but particularly Australia, keen to eke out one more big pay day by hosting a third test.

It was lucrative, but only twice – 2015 and 2019 – was the series still alive by the final test, and the expansion plans may have done long-term harm to the credibility of the contest.

In 2021, only 22,000 turned up at Eden Park to see the All Blacks close the series 2-0 and McLennan says that he wants to retain the series at just two tests for the foreseeable future.

“We are open to it [a third game] in the future but we have got to get the team right for now,” he says.

“There is no point playing three if you don’t think there is genuinely a competition. We will leave it for a few years. The Kiwis love beating us and it is still a ratings winner and in an AFL market this weekend, we will get close to 80,000 people.”