Why the distrust of foreign coaches? Trusted: Wallabies coach Ewen McKenzie. The reaction to Ewen McKenzie's stunning decision to axe six Wallabies and reprimand nine others for a late-night drinking session on tour last month drew a very different response to another "line-in-the-sand" move by a coach recently. Despite being just three months into his job, McKenzie, who took over from Robbie Deans, received almost unanimous backing from officials and the public for his unprecedented move. "The easiest option would have been to do nothing, but to do nothing would give in to mediocrity," he said. We have to set high standards and stick to them. The jersey is important ... players have to understand what that means. You are not just a Wallaby on a Saturday, you are a Wallaby all the time. Robbie Deans. From the World Cup-winning ex-Wallabies prop, it was music to Australians' ears. Mickey Arthur made a similar move during the Australian cricket team's ill-fated tour of India early this year. But rather than be hailed, he was pilloried. Arthur, who had coached his native South Africa before becoming the first non-national to coach Australia, faced similar challenges to McKenzie, taking over an underperforming side in transition and dogged by internal divisions. With the side 2-0 down in India, a string of behavioural infractions culminated in Arthur - along with captain Michael Clarke and team manager Gavin Dovey - dropping four players from eligibility for the third Test. However, rather than support what might have been seen as a courageous move, public frustration, fuelled by comments from several past players, zeroed in on the coach. "Adults we are, not schoolboys," one tweet read. Please let's act properly and make good decisions in India! Need these boys playing. The tweet was from Darren Lehmann, the popular former Australian Test batsman, who was to take over from Arthur following his axing three months after what became mockingly known as "homework-gate." Mickey Arthur. Cricket Australia chief executive James Sutherland admitted the South African was "to some extent" a "scapegoat." "But realistically," he added, "as head coach you need to take responsibility for the performance of the team." That much is accepted. Less obvious is that foreign coaches tend to be afforded far less leeway than home-grown ones. There is an innate distrust of foreigners played out through much greater scrutiny from a public who, in the main, feel more comfortable with being represented by an entirely Australian national team, including the coach. Many wonder how a German football coach, a Kiwi rugby coach, or a South African cricket coach, can truly understand Australian sporting culture, the Australian psyche, what makes Australians tick, and other intangibles. How can they really understand the way the public wants our teams to behave and play? Can we genuinely trust foreign coaches to make decisions in the nation's best interests? And when they make the wrong decisions, how much slack are we willing to cut them compared to an imported version? Holger Osieck. These are pertinent questions for the times: in 2013, three of the biggest national sporting teams - the Wallabies, Socceroos and Australian cricket team - ditched their foreign coaches for Australians. McKenzie, Lehmann and Ange Postecoglou are cut from a similar cloth. They are quintessential hard-nosed, understated and starchy former Australian representatives, who have each explicitly committed to reviving their respective teams' fortunes by restoring in them the Australian spirit. Bob Dwyer wasn't concerned about spirit or culture when Deans was appointed in 2007. The former Wallabies coach didn't believe Deans would face any abnormal challenges by being an outsider. He said he was "100 per cent in favour" of the decision because he felt "the detail" in the way the ex-All Black's Crusaders sides played was exactly what was missing from the Wallabies. Technically, Deans was the perfect fit. However, Dwyer suggests, cultural differences may have been exacerbated in the way Deans dealt with confrontations "with some very self-assured and sometimes egotistical individuals" within the Wallabies set up. It was not unlike Arthur's predicament. "Maybe it is hard for a Robbie Deans or a Mickey Arthur to know how to handle situations like that in an Australian team," Dwyer says. Whereas, a Darren Lehmann or Ewen McKenzie knows to say straight out, 'If you blokes don't smarten up you'll be on your arse.'  Cultural differences should not preclude a good coach getting good results, he believes, but it does add a potential extra layer to the brief. "A good foreign coach would have to be better than an ordinary local coach - but a good local coach would probably be better suited than a good foreign coach," Dwyer says. He feels that way because he's been on the other side and experienced how challenging cross-cultural communication can be. "I've coached in different countries and there's no doubt that the abruptness of the Aussie culture is not easily absorbed by, say, the English," he says. There are certainly some difficulties in making sure that what you say is actually what is being heard. The measure of success for the coaches of Australia's rugby and cricket teams is straightforward: if you're not No.1 in the world, you're underachieving. In football, the reality is different, but expectation is growing. Whereas qualifying for the 2006 World Cup was a spectacular success, qualification is no longer enough. Former coach Holger Osieck, whose job was terminated after heavy losses to Brazil and France and a slide down the world rankings, was bemused as pressure built on his position. The German, who achieved the task he was set by his employers of guiding the Socceroos to the World Cup, said: "To question me then, that's a little bit out of order." He had a point. But, Graham Arnold suggests Osieck might not have realised the extent to which "Australians are not brought up to accept losing." "Australians are known as having a great winners' mentality," says Arnold, who worked with Osieck's Dutch predecessors Pim Verbeek and Guus Hiddink. In a lot of ways we're losing that mentality in football because statements are being made that it's OK to lose. But the Australian way is that you fight and fight and, if you have a bad day, you still win by fighting. That's what Ange is about, that's what he's been saying, to have pride in the national team shirt and to fight for your country. That's the way we've been brought up and it's what this country is built on, backs to the wall type of stuff. We love that. Arnold says his motivation to learn from Hiddink and Verbeek came from a desire to improve Australia's football fortunes. "I wanted us to be better," he says. This is my country and this is my sport. The welfare of the game is the most important thing, not just to qualify for the World Cup. Emotionally, a foreign coach's bond with an Australian team may never be as strong. But technically and practically, football's foreign coaches have delivered a level of expertise that simply did not exist here. And they fitted in relatively well with the Socceroos players, as most top Australian players are based overseas. Their football education was on the fields of Europe, so in many ways they "thought like Guus and Pim," Arnold says. Above and beyond those factors, however, Hiddink had a special talent for engaging with the Australians. "The thing that really stood out for me with Guus was that he was a marvel at wanting to understand the Australian mentality," Arnold says. He didn't want to change anything. He frequently said to me 'I need to become Australian. They don't need to become Dutch'. He just wanted to improve what we were already good at - the never-say-die attitude - he didn't want to change us. A foreign coach works when they buy into it, when they try to really understand what we're about. Postecoglou will not have to buy into it because it's already in his blood. And Arnold, who was a candidate for the national team role, believes his appointment could herald an era of Australian-reared Socceroos coaches. "People like Tony Popovic and John Aloisi have gained a lot of experience overseas and know what it takes to be a top coach," he says. I don't think football will have to go overseas any more to find coaches because there will be home-grown coaches who have the knowledge - as well as the knowledge of Australian culture and mentality. Australia is not unique in being ambivalent towards foreign coaches of our national teams. Just look at what happened when Italian Fabio Capello became England's football coach in 2008. But Professor David Rowe of the University of Western Sydney's institute for culture and society, says fewer seem concerned when results are good. "Once performance is off, cultural issues seem to come up," Rowe says. We saw it with the Mickey Arthur situation, where there was this idea that no dinky-di coach would ask a cricketer to do their homework. So you go back to 'Boof', a bit of a lad, likes a beer, likes a sledge. There is a clear comfort people feel in going back to a dinky-di blokey Australian figure as coach. It's the same with McKenzie. People could never feel the level of comfort with Deans in charge as they do with McKenzie, Rowe says. There was always going to remain a section who perceived Deans as "an All Black in Wallabies clothing," or even a spy, whatever dedication he showed towards the Wallabies. People want alignment in their national teams, from coach to team to player. All have to be pure," Rowe says. So, is it all over for foreign coaches? It all comes down to results, Rowe believes. If they go badly, a crisis of confidence might reignite a belief that a sophisticated overseas coach is what is needed and "the call of the global" might come again. "It tends to oscillate," he says. We feel we don't have anyone good enough here and we go for a foreigner. But then we go the other way and start to feel they are too foreign, they don't understand the Australian psyche and they're not really one of us.