‘I know I have to make a decision’: He rebuilt the Wallabies. But will Joe Schmidt stay on?

Joe Schmidt settles into a seat at a noisy cafe in a hidden lane in Cardiff. It’s a chilly afternoon but the pair of thongs on his feet is a giveaway Schmidt has spent much of the last decade in Ireland.

Sartorial clues about Schmidt’s future are a little harder to decipher, however. The Wallabies coach is also wearing a cap with the logo of Australia’s bid to host the 2027 Rugby World Cup.

The bid part was successfully resolved a few years ago but Schmidt’s involvement at the tournament is up in the air – and right now, it is the million-dollar question for everyone in Australian rugby, from boardroom to living room.

Since signing on as the saviour of the Wallabies in January, amid the wreckage of the disastrous 2023 Rugby World Cup, the New Zealander has not only helped Australian rugby back to its feet, he’s got the code up and running again.

A day after sitting for an interview with this masthead, Schmidt’s Wallabies would dispatch Wales by a record score and keep alive their hopes of a grand slam tour of the UK and Ireland. There are tough matches against Scotland and Ireland to come, but after a famous win over England at the start of the tour, success won’t be measured by staying undefeated.

Already, the winning Wallabies are back in the national conversation, in a positive way. Looking ahead to a sold-out British and Irish Lions series next year, hope and optimism springs anew for fans, players and officials.

But Schmidt only signed a contract to coach the Wallabies until the end of the Lions series in July, and uncertainty about after that has left an increasingly nervous Australian rugby community dangling.

Will Schmidt stay? Will he see out the journey to the 2027 Rugby World Cup in Australia? Or will he walk?

“It’s something I know I have to make a decision on,” Schmidt said.

“And it is something I have committed to making a decision on post-spring tour, and before we get too far into December.”

While coaching in France in 2007, Schmidt and wife Kelly were devastated to learn their five-year-old son Luke had a tumour in his brain. It was successfully removed but it left the youngest of their four children having to negotiate life with severe epilepsy, which meant multiple surgeries and debilitating seizures. After coaching successfully in Ireland, the Schmidt family returned to New Zealand in 2021 and have set up a settled life with Luke in Taupo.

Schmidt has “commuted” between New Zealand and Australia this year, and it’s that work-family balance that will be at the heart of his decision.

“I’ll talk to Kelly and Luke – because it is kind of a package that we come as – when we have a week in Dublin after the tour. My daughter also lives there, and we have lots of friends and even other family, and my brother lives there – so we will have a chat about it then,” Schmidt said.

“I would have to say I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience [with the Wallabies] and the players and the staff, and the challenge that it’s been. It won’t be for a lack of enjoyment. It is just trying to be as stable as possible.

“I think since I started [coaching in July] I have had six, eight and ten days in New Zealand in three different spells. And the rest has been on the road or in Australia. So it is just probably getting that somehow balanced.”

There are back-up plans in the works at Rugby Australia, with Stephen Larkham and Les Kiss front-runners to step up if Schmidt doesn’t stay on. Given what he has achieved so far, however, RA bosses are all crossing fingers and toes Schmidt will stay, and they trade percentage guesses about that likelihood after every passing chat with the Wallabies coach.

Based on the past year, you’d be hard-pressed to find a Wallabies fan who didn’t feel the same way.

Taking on the Wallabies

With morale in Australian rugby at an all-time low at the end of 2023, Schmidt’s decision to take on the job – even short-term – immediately made an impact. Schmidt kept the early predictions to a minimum and set low expectations, but his sheer presence spoke volumes.

A former school teacher, Schmidt wrote in his 2019 autobiography Ordinary Joe that he is a big planner, and still sets up a training week on Sunday night like he did with his lesson plans.

So, 10 months after signing on, has it all gone to plan so far?

“Well, I am a little bit of a contradiction there. I am definitely a planner, but a lot of my planning is short term,” Schmidt said.

“There is an author, Stephen Shapiro, and he talks about don’t use a map, use a compass. I don’t use a map. I don’t know quite where we are going to end up. I just use a compass and try to say, ‘Well these are the really important things, and these are the values I would love the team to hold central’.

“And the other thing is, you can’t plan people.”

Schmidt believes character carries as much importance as ability, and dedicates a chapter in his book to recruiting good people. It begins with the Bill Belichick quote: “Talent sets the floor, character sets the ceiling.”

So, as much as Schmidt spent the first half of the year watching players perform in Super Rugby, and trialling them when the July Tests began, he was just as interested in gauging their character. Schmidt would go on to hand out 17 debuts – the most since the early 1960s – and use five captains.

“It [character] is always really important, and it is one of the things I relied on people in Australia who know the players well,” Schmidt said. “Laurie [Fisher] knows a lot of those players, so I was getting Laurie’s take on who they were, not how they played. I can watch how they play, but I can’t know who they are, or not until they’re in the environment. And I know people have been frustrated and said we have used too many players and used too many debutants, but if we didn’t do it this year, we can’t do it next year.

“So as far as planning was concerned, that’s just about how broad it was. Everything we were trying to drive this year had to be built on the wider base of players that we then try to fine-tune, I suppose, into that Lions series.”

The scars of 2023

The Eddie Jones-led implosion of the Wallabies in 2023 left holes, and scars. The holes were in the Wallabies coaching and support staff ranks, with only four members left when Schmidt began. He had to assemble a new crew of people, most of whom he’d had little to do with.

The playing group also took on a different shape, with Schmidt calling back a large number of players who didn’t get selected for the World Cup. And not using a number who did.

“It was just so new to me, early on I was just trying to understand the individuals,” Schmidt said.

“I felt, personally, the resilience of players had probably suffered a little bit. The confidence of the players had definitely suffered, just because if you don’t get success then inevitably you start to question, are you the right person to be there, is it the right collective, are we going in the right direction?

‘The confidence of the players had definitely suffered.’

Joe Schmidt on the Wallabies after 2023

“I would ask myself those questions every week, anyway. That’s part of coaching. Johan Cruyff said coaching is observing, so I am always watching players and watching staff, and interactions and trying to measure what we need.”

Using a simplified gameplan, a successful first month of three wins over Wales and Georgia followed, but The Rugby Championship proved tougher going, with just one win over Argentina. And even that was tarnished by a record defeat against the Pumas a week later.

Having coached highly successful Irish and New Zealand players, did Schmidt discover specific traits about Australian players?

“Not really, not as people,” Schmidt said.

“I have been incredibly privileged to have worked with really good people, whether it was Irish, the All Black or the Wallaby environments. They’ve been really good people. But not necessarily at the same stages of their development.

“We have quite a few players, not necessarily even young, but inexperienced players. And plenty of young ones as well. We are just helping them build an understanding of what they’re capable of, and then having confidence in that capability, and growing the capacity of the group.”

The turnaround

The wins didn’t come, but Schmidt argued throughout the Rugby Championship the Wallabies were improving. He took heart from running the All Blacks close in Sydney and being highly competitive in Wellington, too.

“That looked like we were able to beat them, in enough moments, that if we could stack them well enough, maybe we could get the result at the end of the day,” Schmidt said.

“But what was really positive for me was how many Australian people were supportive. When I was first in Sydney, it was only Irish people coming up and having a chat. Now Australian people were coming up, saying we are excited about the direction. That was encouraging, because I felt like we were making progress, but if other people could see it too, even if it wasn’t reflected in Ws, that was encouraging.

“But at some stage the Ws have to arrive, or people question it or get impatient. And the players were definitely impatient.”

The twinkle of Twickenham

The breakthrough ‘W’ arrived in spectacular fashion in London. With most giving the Wallabies little chance of beating England, they came from behind and scored in the 84th minute.

“There was a lot of, I suppose, the DNA, that was evident in there,” Schmidt said. “And at the same time, you are not guaranteed anything. I felt like we deserved to win that game and with 30 seconds to go, we weren’t going to. Sometimes you don’t get what you earn. But as long as you are trying to earn it, and you’re building that, then at some stage that will start to deliver.”

One of the most interesting parts was Schmidt’s call to start new recruit Joseph-Aukuso Suaalii against England, in his Test debut and for his first game of rugby since he was 16. It was a bold call, and once he may not have made while coaching Ireland. But Schmidt said like an on-field Test career, experience counts as coach as well.

“It doesn’t mean I am any better at it, but I have seen some situations before and I have coached over 100 Test matches,” he said.

“That doesn’t mean you’ll get all the decisions right – I know I don’t get them all right – but it gives me a bit more confidence to make some tough decisions sometimes.”

The future

Schmidt is still relying heavily on his compass. He jokes that coaching rugby was only something he started doing when he was a young schoolteacher, but also a provincial rugby player, and it was made clear he’d be coaching the school rugby team.

“I just wanted to coach basketball,” he joked.

Even when Schmidt climbed the coaching ranks and it became a full-time gig, he figured he’d soon be discovered as a fraud and go back to teaching.

“That was over 20 years ago now,” he said. “It is very much a per chance career.”

Life in the accompanying spotlight has never sat naturally with Schmidt, and even less so as a potential saviour of Australian rugby, where the Wallabies’ coach has to be part salesman.

“It is not something I am comfortable with. I wouldn’t be actively seeking to be visible,” Schmidt said. “I would still be happy coaching a first XV like I used to when I first started out because that’s the bit I enjoy.”

But Schmidt is an elite, Test-level coach, and it’s a habit he struggled to kick. He said he’d intended to “go fishing” after returning to New Zealand, but was soon back in Super Rugby and then on the All Blacks staff, too. And then he took the Wallabies job.

“I am still relatively keen to getting the fishing rod out, and the golf clubs out. I am committed to getting to a single-figure handicap,” Schmidt said.

It’s the sort of comment that might knock some percentage points off a guess about Schmidt staying. But the next two weeks for the Wallabies might also help restore them.

Wallabies fans will be hoping Schmidt’s clubs sit in the shed until after the 2027 World Cup in Australia.

He’s already got the cap. And it seems to fit.

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