Wayne Smith | October 24, 2009

Article from: The Australian
EVERY now and then, Ewen McKenzie takes his laptop over to the window of his office and shows it the view.
More correctly, he's showing the view -- of cloudless blue skies and, beneath them, the manicured lawn of the Ballymore ground on which the Queensland Reds train -- to his old friends in Paris when they ring him on a video Skype link. His callers, familiar with the grey skies and limited facilities he put up with while coaching at Stade Francais, can't believe what they see. And there are times when it seems McKenzie himself can't quite believe it either.
It was only last month that he was in Paris, living under a grey cloud of his own making as he wrestled with the problem of getting Stade Francais on track after its slow start to the season.
But then synchronicity intriguingly reared its head. Just as he was absorbing the stunning news that Stade owner Max Guazzini had sacked him, QRU chairman Rod McCall was on the phone, passing on the news that Phil Mooney had been moved on and that the Reds were looking for a head coach. From there, as they say, things moved quickly.
After a week on the job at Ballymore, McKenzie's office still has a spartan look about it, just a mass of paper on his desk and, off to one side, a well-thumbed copy of Ian Diehm's history of Queensland rugby. But while this interview was taking place, a worker tiptoed in to measure up his wall for a whiteboard.
McKenzie knows the first thing he is going to write on it, the same thing he wrote on his wall after his debut season as NSW Waratahs coach -- Make the Hard Decisions!
He didn't write it out in full but jotted down just some of the letters, leaving gaps in between. He wanted a reminder only he would understand but perhaps he was also subtly telling himself that no formula provides the complete answer, that you have to fill in the gaps as you go along.
Certainly, there are more gaps for him to fill at Ballymore than there ever were during his five years at the Waratahs, where the culture was second nature to him, from his own days in the NSW side. But McKenzie learns fast.
"I want to understand Queensland," McKenzie said, his thoughts already straying to a meeting later that day with the Brisbane club coaches, a meeting he is relying on to fill in a number of gaps. "Wherever I've gone, I've morphed myself into that environment, to that culture."
Morphing into a Queenslander could take some doing. He smiles at the memory of a Brisbane television news segment announcing the Test cricket team. "They put up the names of the six Queenslanders selected," he recalled, shaking his head. "No one else, just the Queenslanders."
He is the Reds' seventh coach in a decade, the bleakest decade in the past half-century of Queensland rugby. Some of his predecessors chose to ignore Queensland's proud history, some wallowed in it, to the point where it began to drag them down. McKenzie's approach is somewhere in between. He loves the fact that the first thing he sees when he enters Reds headquarters is a small bronze statue of the late, and legendary, Queensland coach Bob Templeton. And if he takes a turn to the left, there is Queensland rugby's Honour Wall, covered in photos of the 25 players who have appeared in 100 or more matches for the state.
"The history drips off the walls here but I quite like it because you need to recognise it. But the reality is that it doesn't help you win your next match," he said.
And ultimately that is what it is all about from the perspective of Queensland rugby supporters. McKenzie might be a New South Welshman, he might have brought former Randwick teammate Jim McKay as his assistant coach and recruited Damian Marsh from the Brumbies as his strength and fitness co-ordinator, but all of that will be forgiven -- and yes, being a New South Welshman at Ballymore is a sin requiring forgiveness -- if the Reds start winning again.
"Until we get some runs on the board, I'm not expecting any love or anything," he said. "I understand there's been a lot of disappointment, a lot of promise that hasn't been realised in one shape or form."
McKenzie should not experience the same extreme pressure to win with style that was an everyday part of his job at the Waratahs. He seems remarkably forgiving of the NSWRU considering it let him go in the year in which the Waratahs reached the Super 14 final for the second time under him, because their style of play was seen as boring, but every so often his pain shows through.
"This was a bunch of people who were trying to work out why NSW couldn't get in the finals, so you deliver them into the finals and they then question the style."
He expects Queenslanders will be more realistic. "I've played here for NSW against Queensland and they mauled the ball for 50m. I'm not saying I love that style. I used to play for Randwick. I enjoy using the ball but at the same time when I started as coach of NSW, we didn't have a lot of Wallabies backs. We had a lot of forwards and forwards generated more forwards."
With Queensland it is the exact opposite. There are five Queensland backs in the Wallabies side for the end-of-season tour -- Will Genia, Richard Kingi, Quade Cooper, Digby Ioane and Peter Hynes -- but only one forward, second-rower James Horwill.
The same pragmatism that forced McKenzie to be conservative with the Waratahs could well see him be adventurous with the Reds. Still, basics are basics.
"I'm saying to the forwards that we've got all these Wallaby backs but if you can't get them the ball, it's going to be a long day. So we've got to put some time into that," he said.
McKenzie is eschewing short-term fixes. He is thinking long-term, of the exciting batch of Australian Schoolboys coming through the Queensland system, of a heap of untapped Queensland Country talent, of the fact rugby league's professional pathway narrows dramatically after the under-20s.
Mostly, however, he's working with what he's got, the nucleus of a Reds squad that finished second-last in this year's Super 14. There was precious little experience in that lot and even less now that Hugh McMeniman and Berrick Barnes have moved on.
Their confidence is low but their hopes remain high. That's the sort of material a no-nonsense coach such as McKenzie can work with. He knows there are hard decisions to be made but he also has a keen sense of what lies ahead. More blue skies.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au...015651,00.html