Peter Jackson’s column: Winning is same in any language for Michael Cheika

Michael Cheika speaks French, Italian and Arabic. He is also known to be fluent in coarse Anglo-Saxon and looks forward to leaving England or Wales lost for words at Twickenham this autumn.
An imposing figure in any language, Australia’s head coach is rapidly nursing the Wallabies back to such robust health that they might conceivably be arriving at the World Cup as champions of the Southern Hemisphere. A win over New Zealand in Sydney on Saturday and Cheika’s resurrected Aussies win a tournament, albeit a heavily truncated one.
For now, he is content to talk up the opposition whether in the French he learned in Paris running Stade Francais, the Italian of his early playing days in Padova, the Arabic of his ancestral Lebanon or the English he spoke growing up in Sydney. No matter how different the tongue, his verdict on the All Blacks is the same – “the best in the world by a long way”.
What he had to say about the farrago over Quade Cooper apparently reneging on his proposed transfer to Toulon was decidedly more interesting. Mourad Boudjellal, owner of the triple European champions, unleashed another tirade in which he called a member of the Australian Rugby Union a “moron”.
Cheika sprang to the defence of his employers. “I don’t think it’s necessary to have that type of language,” he said.
Well, he should know. Hadn’t Cheika hurled the same word at one of England’s finest back row forwards during an argy-bargy at the Cardiff City Stadium?
A rummage through the judicial records confirms that indeed he had. In the turbulent aftermath of the 2011 Amlin Cup final in the Welsh capital where Harlequins edged out Cheika’s Stade Francais, the losing coach encountered Tony Diprose, then managing the Quins’ academy.
Cheika, hauled before the beak on two allegations of misconduct over ‘insulting’ and ‘intimidatory’ behaviour towards George Clancy, was trying to find the Irish international referee when he bumped into Diprose and told him: “Get out of the f*****g way, you f*****g moron.”
A disciplinary tribunal found Cheika guilty as charged and fined him 7,500 euros. He might have had that in mind the other day when he admitted: “People make mistakes. I’ve certainly made a few in my time.”
He said so in another Quade Cooper context, this one over the fly-half’s apology for using expletives on social media.  “Obviously, we can’t have the language,” Cheika said, obviously.
It is also obvious that the man has a winning way about him and that he can keep a lid on his particular Mount Etna, as illustrated by a story from his playing days in the Randwick back row.
Knocked down by Wayne Shelford during a match against the All Blacks in 1988, Cheika got back on his feet with one last verbal shot:
“Is that all you’ve got, mate?”
Cheika, whose father Joe emigrated from Lebanon in 1950 and found his first job on the railway, really is different.
He and his wife, Stephanie, have four children and hubby has been known to push the youngest one in a pram before and during a training session with the Waratahs.
His independent streak is based on solid foundations. Before going into full-time coaching, he worked in the rag trade for Australia’s top fashion designer, Colette Dinnigan, and learned enough to make a fortune from his own fashion distribution business.
Should he succeed in knocking Wales or England out at the pool stage, Cheika’s Wallabies could run into Ireland in the knock-out stages which would be almost as ironic as his condemnation of Cooper’s foul language.
Cheika, lest it be forgotten, was the man responsible for Leinster‘s habit of conquering Europe. He was in charge when Ireland’s capital province won the Heineken Cup for the first time, beating Leicester at Murrayfield in 2009.
Coaching rugby, according to Cheika, “isn’t a job, it’s a passion”. After beating the Springboks in Brisbane and the Pumas in Mendoza, he will find out against the All Blacks in Sydney on Saturday how far his Wallabies have come in a short time.
More intriguingly, he will find out how much farther they can go on a schedule that takes them to Auckland and Chicago before the World Cup opener against Fiji in Cardiff on September 23.
England-Wales happens three days later and if neither manages to short-circuit Cheika into blowing his top, their polyglot rival will be talking about the quarter-final in any one of his four languages.