The Trib (56 page)

Australia, Lebanon, France and Italy all feature strongly in the nomadic life story of Leinster coach Michael Cheika, but it is his dalliance with the world of haute couture that may raise eyebrows.

16 April 2006

I
t starts with a note he's not supposed to see in an office he's probably not supposed to be in and a phone number he's definitely not supposed to ring. Or maybe it doesn't. Maybe it starts further back than that, with a twenty-year-old Lebanese woman visiting her sister in Sydney in the 1950s and just deciding not to go home. Or then again, maybe it doesn't. Maybe it starts – really starts – a fortnight ago in Toulouse with his team deep in their own 22, with his out-half doing what no Irish coach would dream of telling him he's supposed to do, with his team running the length of the pitch for the kind of try no Irish team is supposed to score. Wherever it starts, wherever it ends, Michael Cheika's story isn't exactly the most linear one you'll ever hear. The best ones never are.

Just for kicks, we'll start with the note. Cheika joined Randwick Rugby Club in the Sydney suburb of Coogee when he left school, although even an apparently straight-forward sentence like that needs a little qualification. He'd never played the game. He'd liked it, watched it, regularly went down to the Randwick Oval on a Saturday to shout at those involved in it. But never played it. The reason was simple: A working class kid, he went to a working class school and working class schools in Sydney played league. So he played league.

Within two years of joining up, though, he was in the Australian under-21 squad. Just like that. These were the dying days of amateurism, though, and systems and structures weren't what they would become. In a different era, given different circumstances, maybe he'd have gone on and made a name for himself as a player. As it was, he found himself a crack and slipped through it. Which is where the note comes in.

‘One day, I was in the coach's office and I found a little note on his desk,' he says. ‘There was this guy from a club in France who'd written to him looking for players. He was just looking for any random players our coach could send him. Now, I knew the kind of guy our coach was and there's no way he would have told anyone about that note in a million years. So I lifted it off his desk and stuck it in my pocket and rang the guy myself. I ended up going to France and playing there for a few years and in Italy for a few more.'

In all, he did Europe for seven years. Well, sort of. He got into a routine of playing through the calendar – winter in Europe followed by one at home and then back again in time for the start of the next one. They say Richie Benaud hasn't felt a winter chill on his face for over forty years; Cheika barely saw a summer throughout the 1990s. It's not a gripe, though. Not remotely.

With amateurism on life support, clubs had no shortage of backers prepared to throw the switch. Cheika trousered what was on offer and happily staved off the day when he'd have to get a proper job. When he wasn't playing rugby, he was travelling goggle-eyed throughout Europe, taking in everything from Portuguese sunsets to Russian trains journeys, from Dublin bars to Tuscan villas.

‘There's so much culture and history on this continent to immerse yourself in. Maybe Europeans don't appreciate it as much because they've been here all their lives but for someone coming from a pretty rough-edged part of Sydney or wherever, you're talking absolute worlds apart. I really got to love the European lifestyle, the fact that everywhere has a proper history. The fact that there's a historical relevance to two tribes facing off against each other or to two countries that are next door to each other. I suppose as well, I was lucky to get to learn a few languages. It made up a bit for not pursuing a tertiary education at home.'

There comes a time, though. It's all very well being a multilingual gadabout thousands of miles from home winking at the haughty girl behind the counter at the boulangerie. But one day you wake up and all of a sudden you're twenty-eight. Shit.

So he went home and decided to get a job. He just hadn't a clue as what. Some cousins of his were involved in fashion, ran retail stores. To pick up a few bucks here and there, he went in and helped out. ‘I used to do the occasional shift for them. It was good way to meet girls, if nothing else. I mean, where else can you go and get paid to tell girls they look beautiful? So I used to go there and hang out more than anything. But I picked up a few things about the business along the way.'

Now, to most people, ‘picking up a few things about the business' would mean learning to spot when one of the delivery men is trying to scam you out of a few hundred quid and the like. Not Cheika. He saw an ad in the paper one day that said that Collette Dinnigan was looking for a business manager.

These being the sports pages, the
Tribune
is going to take a punt here and guess that you, dear reader, haven't a rashers who Collette Dinnigan is. Turns out she's far and away the biggest fashion designer in Australia. She dresses people for the Oscars. When Halle Berry attended the world premiere of
Die Another Day
in 2002, she wore a Dinnigan creation. Cate Blanchett, Nicole Kidman, Kylie Minogue? Clothes-horses for this woman.

And having done not an awful lot more than a few shifts winkling phone numbers out of surfer chicks by telling them their bums didn't look big in this skirt or those jeans, Cheika reckoned he would have a go at running this mutli-millionaire's worldwide fashion empire for her. Told you his story wasn't exactly linear.

‘Collette wanted someone who could speak French and Italian, which I could do, and I sort of made up most of the rest. I didn't think for a second I'd get the job and I basically went there with a hand-written foolscap page in an envelope which I slipped under the door. And I don't know, she must have been really desperate or something because she called me back and I met with her three times in three days and ended up working for her. So that's what properly kicked off my interest in the fashion side of things.

‘Working for her was such an amazing experience, the complexity involved in bringing her creativity to production really appealed to me. It was taking the ideas and creations she had and converting them into the reality of pieces in stores. Being part of that was great and it gave me a lot of international experience from a fashion point of view that helped me when it came to setting up my own business later on.'

(Meanwhile, in a galaxy far, far away, a quiet Cork school teacher called Declan Kidney was instilling in two of his pupils – an out-half called Ronan O'Gara and a scrum-half called Peter Stringer – the basics of the skills that will attempt to ruin the afternoon of Collette Dinnigan's former business manager next Sunday. Mad world.)

He was still playing with Randwick and by this stage, not only was he the sharpest dresser at the club, he was also the captain. The complete separation between the two segments of his life suited him down to the ground. Nobody at work talked rugby, nobody at Randwick talked sequins. Not to his face, anyway.

Still, he was restless. He set up a business of his own, dealing in all sorts – fashion, property, a restaurant even. And, even then, it wasn't enough. When the call came from David Campese (a Randwick alunus) saying that there was this club in Italy looking for a coach, the idea intrigued him more than anything. He'd never dreamt of being a coach and even now he isn't all that certain why he decided to go.

‘I left a few unhappy people behind me, not to mention my business partners. Collette was very good about it, even though it was clear that the few months I was taking off from her was going to turn into for ever. I think my reasoning was that if I go there and make a balls of it, then at least I've had a go and at least I've done it in an area that's as testing as possible. Because I didn't have any comforts to fall back on, you know what I mean? I was there by myself, just me and a load of people I didn't know. So I suppose it was as much to see if I could do it as anything.'

He did okay. Some things he found difficult, others not so much. Not having friends or family to come home to helped in a perverse way because it left him with nothing to concentrate on but this new way of life he'd gotten himself into. And preserving distance between himself and players didn't pose any problems either since he'd never really been one for the piss-up and the sing-song anyway. Padova came sixth at the end of his season in charge.

‘I enjoyed it. I wouldn't have kept at it if I hadn't liked it. The challenge really got me going. But there was so much I had to learn. As a coach you've got to have a totally different set of personal skills with regard to players. You've got to be nice to them, for a start. You have to think about the collective in everything you do. It was a good experience.'

He couldn't stay, though. Life got in the way.

When World War II ended, whole countries emerged blinking into the sunlight with no immediate idea about what to do with themselves. Australia had more going for it than most places – a land abounding in nature's gifts of beauty rich and fair, like the song said. What it didn't have was people. Or to be more clinical about it, workers. All these natural resources but nowhere near enough hands to cultivate them.

So the government went trawling. Out went the nets and up went the call. Australia is open for business. Come one, come all. Cheika remembers his father telling him stories about the advertisements that were posted all over Lebanon. A new life, a new hope.

‘There was very little going on in Lebanon. It's a poor country, no real resources, no big industry. It was colonised by the French after World War I and became a more intellectual place than it might otherwise have. There are a lot of universities there and it's a bit more European than a lot of countries in that region.'

His father was twenty when he followed a whole generation out of Lebanon. Ten years later, on a visit to Sydney to stay with her sister who had similarly decamped, his mother met and fell in love with him. Instead of going back home as she'd planned, she stayed, reared a family and indeed lives there to this day. She does so without her husband, though, his failing health the reason for Cheika's return from Padova. He made it home in time for the last chapter of his father's life.

The year in Italy had been a small dose, like a vaccine for coaching almost. But it didn't take. He was laid low with all the symptoms by now and he knew he'd never shake them. Within a year of his return, he'd taken over the Randwick team he'd previously captained, his former teammate David Knox by his side. In three seasons under them, Randwick finished third, second and first in their division, going through his final year there unbeaten. It made him hot property and he applied for the head coach's job at the new Super 14 franchise Perth. When offered the assistant's role, he declined and put the feelers out for a top job somewhere else. Alan Gaffney – his first coach all those years ago at Randwick – saw Leinster in need of a coach, Cheika in need of a blank canvas and indulged himself in a subtle piece of matchmaking. The rest is as they say ...

‘In the beginning, it was a matter of meeting everyone, getting to know the people. You can't just come in and make sweeping changes, you have to assess what's happening in a place, respect everyone's space, understand the history of the place. Like, I understood pretty quickly that there was a lot of scepticism around because this was the fourth coach in four years and also because I wouldn't have been the most high-profile applicant around. I knew there'd be a lot of, you know, “Who is this bloke?” So the first thing that I needed to do was get to know guys and start the respect-building process.'

He knew bits and pieces about Leinster through Gaffney and Gary Ella, and the rest, well, folk weren't long filling him in on the rest. Or at least, what they considered the rest to be.

‘When we started off, everyone wanted to tell us something about the team. I went to a few dinners with people I'd met who didn't know I was the new coach of Leinster and they'd be telling me this and that. Every stereotype you've ever heard of about Leinster, I'd managed to pick up on in the first few weeks. As it turned out, the reality of it couldn't have been more different. These players just took to it with a keenness and an eagerness that made our lives so much easier than all these stories said it was going to be.'

So the stereotype thing bugs him even if, as the only man in the place who can properly be said to be a fashion expert, he will admit that there are plenty of the Leinster squad who have firm opinions on their appearance. ‘The scarf brigade is pretty strong,' he says mentioning nobody in particular. Well, a certain Triple-Crown-sealing try-scorer's name does crop up.

Mostly, though, he falls over himself talking up his players, the ones putting into action the thoughts and ideas he and Knox come up with. And we're back at the start, back with the try Irish teams aren't supposed to score, back with the verve, the imagination, the balls to decline the safe kick to touch in favour of the length-of-the-field bonanza that came instead.