The Wallabies are now immeasurably better

Scrummaging is just a fraction of what Mike Cron will bring to the Wallabies.

As hires go, this is a very astute one by Rugby Australia (RA) and head coach Joe Schmidt.

Cron will be more than just an assistant to Schmidt and a technical resource for the players. Cron’s a life coach and mentor, a man who creates an environment and sense of collegiality that helps make other men better.

I don’t know what life’s been like inside the Wallabies of late. I can only speculate on the environment created by previous head coach Eddie Jones.

But, if we judge it on Jones’ public utterances, then it didn’t appear a particularly healthy one.

Jones didn’t have much to say about RA, the playing stocks, the media or anyone that was especially positive. If there were negatives, Jones seemed pretty keen to focus on them.

Cron’s cut from a different cloth and it vastly undersells him to describe him as a scrum coach or scrum guru. He’s an all round front row coach for starters.

Prop and hooker aren’t the most glamourous, well-understood or appreciated positions on the paddock.

Sure, folk will suddenly care when a scrum routinely goes backwards or someone can’t throw straight to a lineout, otherwise they’re jobs that are largely taken for granted.

Cron creates a genuine front row club within his teams. They have their meetings and social gatherings together, as he seeks to create an air of prestige about their roles.

They genuinely become a team within a team, where everyone strives to make each other better.

It’s not about individual competition, but an environment where they all succeed together.

Cron is as interested in growing the man – and his various qualities – as he is the rugby player.

Looking from the outside, I thought the Wallabies looked shell-shocked in recent months.

There’d been huge upheaval, on and off the field in Australian rugby, and now’s the time for some care and encouragement.

As for the fact Cron’s considerable talents are now at the disposal of Australia, rather than New Zealand, I simply don’t care.

You will never hear me say that any servant of New Zealand rugby can’t lend their experience to someone else.

However, I was slightly alarmed, though not surprised, by Cron’s words of support for former All Blacks coach Ian Foster.

I also largely dismiss them.

Cron and Foster were colleagues of longstanding and, of course, the former is going to think and speak well of the latter.

But I cannot endorse Cron’s narrative that Foster was “a great, great man’’ done wrong by New Zealand Rugby and the media.

Excellence is the benchmark for All Blacks and Foster’s teams didn’t reach that.

In fact, at times, they were truly mediocre.

As with Jones and the Wallabies, we’re not in the inner sanctum. And, frankly, that’s partly because teams such as the All Blacks aren’t prepared to show us much about how things work behind closed doors.

My experience of covering that team was being told that all involved were exceptional, you were a comparative peasant and therefore not worthy of knowing how these great men operate.

Maybe Foster was exceptional in the team environment. Maybe he was a leader and did have plans and charisma.

But he didn’t portray that publicly and, along with the results, that’s all the rest of us have to go on.

That said, the Wallabies are now immeasurably better for Cron’s involvement.

Their results might not improve markedly in the short term, but the development of their players will be enhanced no end.

I look forward to seeing what Cron and Schmidt can achieve in these next two years and the legacy their tutelage leaves.