McKenzie can end this cultural cancer

The biggest rugby match on Australian soil in a decade and these two players let the team down yet again. What should have happened is they should have been evicted from the Wallabies on match day. It would have caused pandemonium. It would have caused chaos. And it would have brought the Wallabies together like nothing else.

But, of course, nothing happened. The expedient thing was to bury the whole episode and pretend it never happened. It was the smart thing to do. It was the practical thing. And it was utterly the wrong thing to do because it showed everyone within the Wallabies who really cares -- which is just about everyone -- that the cultural cancer within the team was utterly out of control.

And to think Robbie Deans stubbornly held Quade Cooper at arm's length, manufacturing reasons why he hadn't been selected -- what better man, incidentally, to have sent into the fray when Australia slid behind 29-16 on Saturday night? -- while embracing players whose toxic impact on the Wallabies was evident to all the world.

We've reached the end of the Deans era and, like most endings, we approach it with some sadness. He promised so much at the beginning. When he spoke of "playing what's in front of us" we all oohed and aaahed and wondered why on earth none of us had ever thought of it. As a game plan, it was somewhat short on detail but the assumption was that Deans was holding back all the good stuff, all the deep and fascinating detail that would make it work. It was only over time that the realisation set in that whatever else was happening within the Wallabies, attention to detail wasn't one of them.

Like his two immediate predecessors, John Connolly and Eddie Jones, the trigger point for assembling Deans's firing squad was a scrum that failed him miserably. He inherited a shambles and now he will pass one on to either Ewen McKenzie or Jake White.

But how did it get to that? Yes, there have been some promising moments for the Wallabies at set-piece time over the past year or two but the scrum has always been Australia's Achilles heel so why was it that the match was only 13 minutes old before French referee Romaine Poite was pleading with James Horwill to do something about it?

Even through the "ref's ears" it was possible to hear the desperation in his French-accented voice. He didn't want to have to go to a yellow card but in the end -- well, 10 minutes later -- he decided he had no IC card.

Technically, the Wallabies' scrum is deficient, so why wasn't it tactically smart? If Japan can clear its scrum ball in the blink of an eye using channel one, why is it so difficult for the Wallabies? If the Wallabies weren't going to get the right-hand side of their scrum up, why weren't they using a heap of left-hand scrum plays?

The Australian Rugby Union now is going about the grim process of regime change. Bill Pulver already has sounded out both the Reds and the Brumbies to make certain they are prepared to release McKenzie or White, whichever one is needed. Former Wallabies flanker and ARU high-performance manager Brett Robinson is understood to be heading the committee to decide which of the two worthy candidates will become the next Australia coach.

I believe White would do an excellent job with the Wallabies and I recall urging him to apply for the position when, by chance, I happened to be booked into the same Parisian hotel as the Springboks before the 2007 World Cup. The work he has done with the Brumbies over the past two seasons has been nothing short of outstanding.

But I am going to break ranks with the mob and urge the ARU to go with McKenzie instead. When I suggested this to Pulver just over a week ago, he laughed and said I had my Reds hat on.Naturally I blustered and protested and argued, quite persuasively I thought, that I had even supported him when he was coaching NSW. But on reflection I had to concede there was a lot of truth in what Pulver said.

But consider this -- everyone involved in Queensland rugby, from QRU chairman Rod McCall and CEO Jim Carmichael all the way down to the lowly media who each day troop out to Ballymore for press briefings, has nothing but admiration for McKenzie and the way he goes about his business.

This is an important point given the mudslinging coming from critics who barely know him -- the people who know McKenzie the best sing his praises the loudest.

His attention to detail is breathtaking yet he is a big-picture man, capable of looking beyond the Reds to identifying how Australian rugby needs to rebuild. He has the Reds playing a brand of rugby that left the Lions and the British media agog and while Queensland ultimately lost that match, it might very well have been a different story had the Wallabies released a lineout jumper or two.

He won a World Cup as a player, he helped take the Wallabies to a World Cup final as an assistant coach. He has been the most successful Super Rugby head coach in the history of both NSW and Queensland, has coached in Europe and returned to resurrect the Reds and in the process break Deans's own record for most Super Rugby matches as head coach.When he said in 2006 he wasn't ready to coach the Wallabies, he showed that for all his ambition he was a realist. We believed him then. Believe him now when he says he is ready.

I'm not entirely sure why this is critically important but somehow it is. Deans last week came down hard on a journalist who attempted to get him to explain what he had learned from coaching Australians that he didn't know when he came into the job back in 2008 and he basically batted the question out of court. All Blacks, Springboks, Wallabies -- all pretty much experience the same thing so they're all pretty much the same, was the Deans response.

Well, clearly they're not and while Micky Arthur never had any real contact with the Black Caps, he was head coach of both the Proteas and the Australians and the sad evidence is that while he took South Africa to No 1 in the world, he just didn't work for the Aussies.His chemistry with the Australian cricketers wasn't right, just as Deans's chemistry with the Wallabies has fluctuated from acidic to alkaline.

McKenzie sets high standards and it's noticeable that almost all the trouble Cooper has ever been embroiled in has happened while he was on duty with the Wallabies. But as rigid as McKenzie is on cultural issues, he's a flexible tactician. If the Lions game represented the breathless end of his tactical spectrum, the hard-nosed, hard-bitten end surfaced in 2011 when the Reds kicked the Stormers off the park at Newlands to begin their epic run to the title.

The brand of rugby the Wallabies play is absolutely central to the growth of the code in Australia. As the Wallabies play has shrunk in recent seasons, so too has popular support for the game. A McKenzie-coached Wallabies would have a crack. Nothing is more certain. It's time for Australia to reclaim the Wallabies.

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