Sliding door on coaches box still leaves no way out for Wallabies UNDER slightly different circumstances, this would have been a fairly momentous day in the life of Jake White. By "slightly different circumstances," I mean of course that White back in July had beaten Ewen McKenzie for the Wallabies coaching job, which, as we all know, was not the way events actually unfolded. But if, in our sliding doors scenario, White had won the job as many expected - most significantly and touchingly, White himself - then today "his" Wallabies would have been taking on the Springboks - the side he coached to the 2007 World Cup in his own home town, Cape Town. Certainly Robbie Deans must have gulped in disbelief to find himself, on August 1, 2010 at Etihad Stadium in his home town Christchurch, looking across at the Deans Stand named in his family's honour, watching "his" Wallabies do battle with the All Blacks, the legendary side he had once graced and then helped to coach. And had he known that this would be the last Test played at that ground before the earthquake destroyed it, then, as phlegmatic a man as he might be, the poignancy of the moment might well have overcome him. Now, if the rumours are correct, Deans is heading to France to coach Clermont. One door closes, another opens and if the rumours are true, then Australians would wish him well. Those who at the end advocated Deans' removal as Wallabies coach, myself included, came in for hysterical criticism for being xenophobes, as though the only rational reason one might actually want to bring his six-year reign to an end was because we hated New Zealanders. I can't speak for Deans' other critics, but the reason I began lobbying for him to be replaced was because the Wallabies were barely winning as many as they lost and even when they won they were playing a brand of football that was alienating even long-time Australian rugby supporters, driving them away in droves. Australian rugby was starting to switch off on the Wallabies, which was almost unheard of. No matter how grim things had been in the past, the Wallabies supporters had always ridden out the storm with their team but, from the 2011 World Cup onwards, they increasingly felt alienated from it. Frankly, I couldn't have cared what the coach's nationality was, as long as he was delivering what the Australian rugby public wanted, but increasingly it was becoming evident that a foreign coach would struggle with the Wallabies because he just didn't get where they were coming from. The All Blacks while Deans was coaching them, like the Boks under White, always played from a position of strength, superiority even. Key elements of rugby were so engrained in their psyche, so deeply understood and so well acted upon, that there was no need to labour the point with them or indeed to mention them at all. But rugby culturally does not have that same grip on Australians. The very best Wallabies coaches have always been those who understood that when players came into their teams it wasn't the end of the journey for them but the very start of it. They saw it as their job to teach them, sometimes starting from scratch. Bob Dwyer, Rod Macqueen, Alan Jones - all were either great teachers or great man managers who knew to recruit good teachers. It was for this reason that I stressed to new ARU boss that the next Wallabies coach had to be an Australian. I can understand that he interpreted that as simply pushing McKenzie ahead of White, but in fact it was more a case that McKenzie knew what the players didn't know and, if necessary, would be prepared to go back to basics to teach them. Pulver's response then was that he simply wanted the best coach, not the best coach who happened to be Australian. At the time, that line would have offered a lot of encouragement to White and his supporters. But inherent in Pulver's thinking was that the best coach would have the Wallabies playing in a way that would resonate with Australians. White might have got them playing well but in a way that South Africans might have admired but which would have left Australians cold. Hark back to the 2006 Mandela Plate battle in Sydney between John Connolly's Wallabies and White's Springboks. White's tactics were the same ones he used in just about every Test - play no rugby out of your own half, put up contestable kicks, force the opposition to kick for touch and then attack from the platform of the lineout, usually through the driving maul. But Connolly that day had, as he puts it, the shits with Australia having to be always the side taking risks so he instructed his side to effectively give the Springboks their own tactics back at them. By halftime, the crowd was a seething mass of discontent, having witnessed no rugby whatever, and in the dressing room captain Stirling Mortlock and Connolly's assistant coaches Michael Foley and Scott Johnson were in revolt, pleading with him to change the game plan. Connolly was adamant and when the man they call "Knuckles" gets that certain look in his eye, wise men know not to challenge him. As it happened, the Wallabies won, right at the death, but it was a pyrrhic victory because that wasn't the way Australians wanted to win. The knives were out for him from that day forth. The evidence of the Brumbies' play this year was that under White the Wallabies would have looked an awful lot like his Springboks of old. Now, as McKenzie is discovering, there's an awful lot about White's tactics that make a lot of sense and he was quick to point out that playing a lot of rugby, especially out of Australia's own half, had done the Wallabies no good at all against the All Blacks and Springboks in this year's Rugby Championship. So it won't be White in the Wallabies coaches box at Newlands today but McKenzie. Again, all the signs are that the Springboks, utterly comfortably playing their game, will prevail. But one of McKenzie's great virtues as a coach is that he now only analyses the weaknesses in the opposing players but in his own players as well. He knows where they are deficient - and lately there has been an awful lot to be aware of - and he is adept at structuring a game that, if executed, hides their shortcomings while playing to the strengths. As for White, missing out on the Wallabies job would have been a shattering blow, especially since he came so close. But such setbacks are surely part and parcel of being a professional football coach. Very few go through their careers without experiencing one. It's disappointing he didn't see the journey through to the end at the Brumbies and served out the second half of his four-year contract. He had sold the Brumbies players the idea that they were building something special and they bought into that dream, body and soul. As sympathetic as they would be to White, especially when he claims he misses his family back in South Africa, it's going to be difficult for them not to feel they have been left in the lurch.