Cheika’s first job: to speak ‘Tiger’

It is therefore striking to discover that when Michael Cheika pitches up as their 12th full-fat head coach of the professional era (there have been two or three of the “caretaker” variety into the bargain), Australia will sneak ahead of England in the nationality tally.

Bob Dwyer, Pat Howard, Matt O’Connor and the recently departed Dan McKellar were Cheika’s predecessors from the land of Wallaby green and gold and the arithmetic is clear: together, they outnumber Dean Richards, John Wells, Richard Cockerill and Steve Borthwick. The Aussies may be up against a wall on the field of play, but when it comes to the dugout, it is more a case of wall-to-wall.

Will Cheika, as gifted a coach as he is combustible a personality, deliver tangible success in the way Dwyer and Howard did back in the day, or fire a series of blanks, as O’Connor and McKellar did in more recent times? The smart money must be on the former, assuming the 57-year-old Sydneysider finds a way of communicating his ideas in an environment not always receptive to new-fangled thoughts and theories.

He is quite the linguist – fluent, it is said, in French, Italian and Arabic. But can he speak Tiger? “The trouble with cracking the Leicester lineout code,” muttered a Bath forward, back in the days when the two clubs were the fiercest of rivals, “is that they don’t speak in English. We can’t understand a bloody word they’re saying.”