The Kangaroos coach candidates proves how (un)serious Australia takes international rugby

There were many elements to Mal Meninga’s appointment as the inaugural coach of the Perth Bears that didn’t make a whole heap of sense.

The public courting of first Brad Arthur and then Sam Burgess was weird, as was the decision that Meninga would be the guy to take on this role.

Mal has a 53% record and hasn’t coached in the NRL since 2001, but the fact he walks into an expansion job is very strange. 

His record as a rep coach is pretty good, but he did have the easiest two gigs in rugby league, picking the goldenest of golden generations of Queensland talent and then the Kangaroos job, where you get first dibs on almost all the best players in the NRL.

As a third point, the only job cushier is the one he had with Fox League, where Mal has the plumb Super Saturday studio gig for the bulk of the season, then got to coach Australia at the end. 

Perhaps the least shocking part, given the recent history of the jersey, is that the departure of the long-standing Kangaroos coach was barely mentioned.

The hunt for the next Australian national coach seems to be a quick dart around the TV studios to see what the other panelists are doing in November.

Brad Fittler, a sideline regular for Channel 9, is the favourite, followed by his sofa-mate Cameron Smith and newly minted Fox co-commentator Kevin Walters. 

It’s hard to call this an exhaustive search: it looks like head hunting via channel surfing. Has anyone asked Andrew Voss if he’s available?

Smith, who has never been a head coach at any level, said the quiet part loud when asked about his interest in coaching the country he represented 56 times as a player.

“If there was one team out there that would gain my interest to coach, it would be the Kangaroos,” he said. “You’re dealing with the best of the best.

“As far as the calendar’s concerned when those commitments occur, it’s at the end of the year, so that works in with my commitments with commentary.”

Coaching Australia would be great, as long as I can still be a commentator seems like an incorrect ordering of cart and horse for what should be the biggest rugby league job in the world. 

It’s hard to imagine Tony Popovic, the manager of the Socceroos, only taking the job if he can keep doing the A-League on Channel Ten. 

The malaise around appointing the next man to lead the national team of rugby league’s biggest nation should come as no surprise.

The Australian Rugby League Commission (ARLC) are the global leaders for international rugby league and have, on a structural level, improved in recent years in their attitude to Test football.

Whether that is by luck or judgement is debatable: Australia provides the bulk of the talent and eyeballs, which drives performances and revenue, but most of that is done in service of the NRL rather than any higher ideas. 

Remember, the ARLC gave the TV rights to international rugby league away for free to its NRL broadcasters, causing a huge ruckus with the Rugby League Player’s Association that went on for several months before, ultimately, they caved and gave the players what they wanted.

Australia does at least deign to play Test footy now. 

They didn’t between 2019 and 2022, with Covid cited as a reason, though Australian national teams in other sports travelled throughout the world for fixtures, and the Kangaroos could have played properly competitive games without leaving home.

Last year, Australia even played in Sydney. In the 15 years prior to that, you’d have had more opportunity to see them play in Leeds than in the biggest rugby league market on Earth.

It’s no wonder that coaches don’t care about the national team job, because if you look at the way the game works in Australia, it’s clear that the authorities rank it behind clubland and Origin in their priorities.

The Kangaroos should be like the All Blacks, the undisputed face of the game to the rest of the world, the perennial champions and benchmark for elite rugby league. Instead, they’re an afterthought.

The coaching cohort has followed the players in this respect.

The best thing that has happened to the international game in decades was the change in player eligibility rules that ignited the Pacific Nations at the 2017 World Cup.

Now, of the 36 players named for Game 2 of State of Origin, at least ten will opt for Pacific Championships over a Kangaroo Tour at the end of the year. They see the value in Samoa and Tonga that Australia fails to attribute to itself.

The coaching candidates reflect this.

Smith brings the aura of being one of the game’s greatest ever players but has no head coaching record at all.

Brad Fittler managed just a 50% record coaching a NSW side with a permanent talent advantage, but could somehow fail upwards into the national team gig.

Kevin Walters has exactly the same representative record – with the talent reversed, as he coached Queensland – but was at least a full-time coach recently and could bring that recent competitive experience in the week-to-week NRL to bear on the Kangaroos. 

His NRL record, however, is also 50% over a near-100 game sample size, all of which came at a Brisbane Broncos side that expects far better.

Whoever they pick mightn’t matter. The Kangaroos have such a talent advantage that anyone could get a tune out of them, even if that means that every single game has to be a victory.

Even against England, who also have a whole league’s worth of players to pick from, that is true. Anything less than a 3-0 whitewash is an underperformance for Australia, and a series defeat, which would be the first since 1972, is unfathomable.

The 4D chess conspiracy theory might be that Australia actually wants to lose, given the boost that it would be for the international game (not to mention ticket sales for next year’s World Cup, which they will host), if England were to prevail in the Ashes.

In truth, it’s not that at all. It’s that deep down, it’s not a priority. If it was, they’d treat the process a little more seriously.