Watch every second of the Wallabies Nations Championship live and on demand via Stan Sport.<\/a><\/p>\nThe former Wallabies boss is the last to bring success to the club, hoisting the Super Rugby premiership in 2014 alongside his two former players.<\/p>\n
Cheika returns to Rugby Union after a stint with the Sydney Roosters, knowing he must take a different approach to get the best out of a youthful Waratahs squad.<\/p>\n
“It’s 10 years later, so there’s a different way of what they’ve had applied to them, how they’ve been brought up and coached maybe differently, so I want to show them something new and maybe a different way altogether,” he said.<\/p>\n
“There’ll be some things I’m going to do this year that I haven’t even done before so I want to do things differently because I want to get a different outcome. <\/p>\n
“I think that this is a very new adventure.
I’m not going back to the 2014 or ’15 playbook and trying to reinvent that at all. From a point of view of who the club is, I can definitely look back to that. We had a very strong identity back then and then as far as footy’s concerned, I want to create a completely new picture.”<\/p>\n
Cheika reiterated multiple times that the intention was never to return to the Waratahs, eventually getting the call from RA CEO Phil Waugh to replace Dan McKellar.<\/p>\n
However, he believes 2027 is the right time for both club and Cheika for the pair to reunite, bringing him back in sky blue for the first time in 12 years.<\/p>\n
“I wouldn’t be the type of person who was going to be persuaded. I haven’t really had contact with many people, if anyone, from Australia in rugby since the World Cup in ’19, and I thought that when Phil contacted me, he handled that situation very well, very straight up and down, very direct with how that went down, and I appreciated that,” Cheika explained.<\/p>\n
“I had to decide in my own head that I could do what was necessary to make the team go well. It’s not about me, it’s about the team.<\/p>\n
“Teams need a certain type of coach at a certain time and that fluctuates. You may not be the right guy for that team at that time, and I had to feel like I would be the right guy for this team at this time, and then answer in my own head, ‘Okay, this is what I think would need to get done, can I do that?’ <\/p>\n
“I answered to myself yes, obviously, so then it becomes a really exciting opportunity…I didn’t really need to be persuaded; I had to answer my own questions about whether I could get the team to where we want it to be.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NSW Waratahs coach Michael Cheika knows it’s a ‘new adventure’ this time around as he restarts life at…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":951786,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,32951,760,85,48013],"class_list":["post-951785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-nsw-waratahs","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-super-rugby-pacific"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/951785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=951785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/951785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/951786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=951785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=951785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=951785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}