Two Wallabies coaches, five captains, four chief executives, three chairman and more than 65 men's Test players - it hasn't exactly been a quiet World Cup cycle in Australian rugby.
And now, as the Wallabies prepare for an assault on the game's global showpiece, one they are rated little chance of making any major impact upon, stakeholders across the Australian cohort may pause and reflect on a period that has borne witness to a level of upheaval not previously seen since rugby turned professional in 1995.
While the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic played a large role in the trials and tribulations of Australian rugby, the brevity of the drama really hits home when you recall the infighting, standoffs, sackings, appointments, reappointments, departures, diplomatic tensions, lobbying, television deals, wins, losses and draws -- not to mention a certain French referee -- and just what impact it has had on the game Down Under.
Add to that an airport interview Eddie Jones described as the "worst press conference ever" and near mutiny among the Wallaroos ranks in the space of three days, and there are few squares yet to be crossed off Australian rugby's bingo card of doom.
The past four years have made the Israel Folau saga a virtual afterthought.
In boxing parlance, Australian rugby have been rocked on the chin on more than one occasion, but while the white towel was almost thrown in, the game has gathered its feet, retaken its guard and punched its way out of the corner. Landing a knockout blow itself appears a way off on the horizon yet, but it has at least steadied enough to start fighting back.
On the evidence of the Wallabies' recent form, however, they're more likely to be shadow boxing as the World Cup extends deeper into October. But more on that later.
To truly understand the fallout of the past four years, it's worth traveling back to November 20, 2019, when Dave Rennie was unveiled as Wallabies coach. A bit over a month earlier, his predecessor Michael Cheika had stepped down, knowing the axe would come down on his head without a preemptive strike, 24 hours after England had walloped the Wallabies in Oita, Japan.
While cautious about the appointment of another foreigner to the top job in Australian rugby, Rennie's appointment was rubberstamped by then chief executive Raelene Castle, a Kiwi herself, and generally well received given the New Zealander's success with Super Rugby franchise, the Chiefs. He had also taken Glasgow Warriors to the final of Guinness PRO12.
But two major bombs exploded before the Kiwi even stepped foot Down Under, the first, of course, was COVID, which ravaged the world far beyond the trivial pursuits of professional sport. The second was the first major domino in a series of boardroom moves, that being the decision of the Rugby Australia board to manouvre Castle out of the picture.
As Australian rugby teetered on the precipice of financial ruin, with no product to sell and therefore no way to remunerate its players, the outlook was grim.
While a deal was reached with Australia's playing cohort, with sweeping pay cuts enacted to keep the game solvent, and jobs were axed at the code's bloated headquarters, Castle's relationships across the game had virtually disintegrated. When the revised pay deal was announced on April 20, 2020, she resigned three days later having been told she no longer had the support of the board.
Castle's departure was preceded by the infamous Captain's letter, which had called for her removal and came amid revelations from stand-in executive chairman Paul McLean that she had been the victim of "abhorrent bullying". It was Australian rugby's own civil war, the old guard trying to stop the onset of the new, both believing they had rights to the game's stewardship and the ability to drag it out of its now desperate mire.
In the end, it was left to interim chief executive Rob Clarke and the newly inserted chairman Hamish McLennan to pick up the pieces, with figurative fires to extinguish all over the place.
"It was a s---show, and I knew it. I didn't have to think about it, I knew it," McLennan told ESPN when asked what his memories of his first few days on the job.
One of the first orders of business was to generate a product, something the game could sell to its then broadcaster Fox Sports. But with international travel halted by the pandemic and the break-up of Super Rugby well and truly underway, Rugby Australia was forced to come crawling back to the Western Force - the same franchise it had booted out of the competition only three years earlier.
Hat in hand, the game on its knees, McLennan broke bread with Force owner Andrew Twiggy Forrest, asking for the West Australian outfit to reunite with the game's four other professional franchises for the establishment of Super Rugby AU.
The lift on the Force's part went well beyond what was traditionally expected, the team relocating to the east coast to ensure the competition could proceed despite state border closures; Melbourne Rebels, meanwhile, had to shift out of Victoria because of the same issue.
The eight-round, home-and-away [of sorts], competition was eventually won by the Brumbies, and just as important as the broadcast revenue was the fact that it gave Rennie the chance to examine his new cohort in the flesh for the first time.
One wonders what might have been had a certain Reece Hodge penalty goal not cannoned into the right upright at Westpac Stadium in Bledisloe I, October 11, 2020. A first win over the All Blacks in New Zealand in 20 years might well have fired the Dave Rennie Wallabies era, at its beginning that afternoon, onto something truly special, but Hodge's kick careered back out into play and eight-and-a-half minutes later the game finished in a 16-all draw.
A solitary win was all Rennie could muster from his first six games in charge, as Australia hosted a Tri Nations minus the Springboks, and RA itself concluded its 24-year partnership with Fox Sports.
Three years on, the move to Stan Sport and the Nine Entertainment Group has been viewed as a moderate success. The presence of Super Rugby content back on free-to-air television, a dedicated streaming service that acts as a one-stop shop for content from grassroots through to Test rugby, and a fresh look for a game that had shuffled down Fox's list of priorities are all regarded as genuine positives.
Amidst all that, RA had also formalized its pursuit of the hosting rights for the Rugby World Cup in 2027 and 2029. Having assembled a crack team of business high-flyers, political big wigs and Wallabies greats, the governing body moved quickly to woo World Rugby executives on the merits of bringing the game's showpiece back to Australia for the first time in 24 years.
Right from the outset, the dream looked to be a reality, and when the news was confirmed, and the "Golden Decade" of events that will include rugby sevens at the 2032 Brisbane Olympics was secured, the game had another shot of adrenaline as issues presented themselves elsewhere.
While the hounds had been quietened on the domestic front, the claws were out across the Tasman where New Zealand Rugby had earlier set its sights on redrafting Super Rugby in its own image; the break-up with South Africa now complete, NZR was keen to maintain its key strategic and geographic alliance with Australia, but only on its own terms.
"Two or three" Australian teams was all NZR was prepared to include in its planned reorganization, and ownership, of Super Rugby - an invitation that could not have been met with more disgust on the other within RA.
"I love New Zealand and its people and we have strong cultural ties and a rich rugby heritage, but it feels a bit master-servant at the moment," McLennan told the Sydney Morning Herald at the time.
"If we're building up to the World Cup and rebuilding Australian rugby we need the maximum amount of teams in the competition, including our friends at the Force."
One of the criticisms of the Castle-Cameron Clyne era was that Australia had lost its voice in the hallways of rugby powerplay, both at SANZAAR and World Rugby levels, but McLennan could not have done more to reassert the country as a senior player, rattling plenty of cages along the way.
Three years after he first rebuked NZR over its treatment of Australia, McLennan remains on the front foot. Having already successfully lobbied for a greater share of revenue from Super Rugby Pacific -- the competition's eventual evolution from 2022 in which Australia had all five of its franchises included -- he continues to play hard ball around an independent commission, while also driving support for new concepts such as Super Rugby Pacific draft.
A few weeks ago, his pursuit of an Australia-New Zealand invitational team to face the British & Irish Lions in 2025 was officially rubber-stamped, albeit with multiple questions about just who might end up being available to play.
But the trans-Tasman relationship almost exploded completely after the All Blacks pulled out of a Test in Perth in 2021. Citing uncertainty around scheduling for the Rugby Championship, which was to have its four final rounds contested across Queensland, NZR informed its RA counterparts that the All Blacks wouldn't be travelling for the Optus Stadium encounter on Aug. 28, 2021.
Disagreements around who was informed of what, and when, continue to this day, but the level of Australian fury was perhaps best summed up Dave Rennie, the usually mild-mannered coach declaring he was "bloody angry".
One can only imagine how he felt then when he was sacked by RA 18 months later.
Throughout those cross-Tasman squabbles, it was left to Rugby Australia chief executive Andy Marinos, who had replaced interim boss Rob Clarke at the start of 2021, to rebuild dialogue and a relationship he described to ESPN near the end of 2021 as being like: "two brothers... you're going to have your dust-ups, you're going to have difference of opinions, but at the end of the day we are both committed to what's good for the game and growing the game in our region, and so we'll continue to work in that vein."
The fact that the two nations finally successfully created Super Rugby Pacific, and have had two cycles of the competition to date, suggests that the trans-Tasman alliance has been adequately repaired, if not cemented for the longer-term future.
And, as in all walks of life, relationships come and go, too.
As time wore on, and the promise the Wallabies showed in that 2021 Rugby Championship faded from view, the walls began to close in on Dave Rennie. After a 7-7 season, the Wallabies could only muster five wins from 14 Tests in 2022, although near misses to the All Blacks [see, Mathieu Raynal], Ireland and France proved Australia weren't all that far away either.
But in the background RA had quietly sounded out Eddie Jones for a return home and when the 63-year-old was sacked as England coach, the spotlight shifted to Rennie; the Kiwi lasted little more than a month, his tenure ending in a Zoom call and a flight back to New Zealand.
Many Wallabies were privately gutted, especially those in the Pasifika community with whom Rennie had helped bridge a divide following the Folau saga.
"My first reaction was that I was definitely gutted for Rens, and I think mainly because he had a lot of respect from a lot of the boys in the team," Allan Alaalatoa, who suffered a devastating Achilles rupture in Bledisloe I, told ESPN in February. "He was a good man off the field, but he was very direct and honest on the field as well.
"I think that was my first impression, and as the days went on you just had to understand what was important next for us moving forward and that was Eddie."
In the lead-up to his sacking, Rennie had been asked if he would work under Jones. His reply could not have been more emphatic, his objection viewed as a veiled dig at McLennan's maneuvering behind the scenes, even if it was to play a part in the Kiwi's ultimate downfall.
While Rennie had been almost universally loved by his players, chief executive Andy Marinos did not enjoy the same bond, which is in no way unexpected given the off- and on-field divide that exists in any professional sport.
A tetchy discourse with Quade Cooper and Samu Kerevi, players re-engaged with the Wallabies under the updated Giteau Law, in 2021, had contributed to that gulf, after the then-chief executive questioned their integrity and the decision to choose club over country.
But Marinos pushed back when he felt something didn't sit like it should, and that is reported to have played a role in his own exit in 2023 which came shortly after the announcement rising NRL star Joseph Suaali'i would be joining rugby's ranks in 2025.
McLennan heralded the youngster's "return" to rugby as a watershed moment for the code and said Suaali'i would be a "wonderful ambassador" for the game. But the size of the deal -- rumoured to be around $1.6m a season -- caused outrage at all levels of the game, not least of which from players who had taken pay cuts only three years earlier to help keep the game afloat.
Again, McLennan had proved a sizeable obstacle, or at least a figure whose get-on-board-the-train-or-get-off-the-tracks" approach was too much to bear and so Marinos followed Rennie out of Moore Park.
His replacement? A return to the trusted model of RA supremos, but someone who also had an existing and significant footprint in the game, Phil Waugh.
Insisting he will be someone to push back against McLennan, Waugh also subscribes to the belief that you have to "lean in" to drive positive outcomes; McLennan has certainly led with his chin in his three years in the game.
"I see it as a team effort, you're always going to have battles," Waugh told reporters when asked how he would work alongside his outspoken chairman Hamish McLennan. "It's a bit like playing [or in] the selection room you'll have differences of opinion, but when you go out to market you want to have a united front.
"So I'll certainly challenge aspects that I may disagree with, but then when we go to market we need to make sure that we're out there in front of people as a united board with the executive. So I don't see it [as a problem], I think it's quite exciting, I like ambition and leaning in and having a crack."
The Wallabies, too, are having a crack, just without any results under Jones to date. The decision to insert a new coach at the start of a World Cup year, with only five Tests before their first pool game, was always going to be risky. And despite his personality as an eternal optimist, Jones has admitted that he misjudged the size of the challenge.
In five defeats thus far, the Wallabies have conceded an average of 35.8 points. Their most recent loss to France also highlighted concerns around goal kicking, with youngster Carter Gordon kicking just 1 of his five attempts on goal.
Jones' decision to omit Quade Cooper from his World Cup squad has been widely slammed, particularly after the veteran stepped up with a 45-metre penalty that brought the Wallabies level late in the second half of Bledisloe II. Michael Hooper was another high-profile casualty of Jones' decision to look to the future, repeated questions about the experienced duo at Sydney airport too much for Jones as he lost his cool with the local media.
If the team's departure for the World Cup had not been ugly enough, a scathing social media post from the Wallaroos then created another problem for RA, one Waugh has since attempted to quell by repeating the promises that fully professional contracts lie ahead of Australia's women's rugby players.
While RA certainly hasn't covered itself in glory when it comes to women's rugby, and many other areas of the game require urgent attention, its pursuit of capital -- either through a debt facility or private equity -- should secure the game's future in Australia in the short term. Centralisation, meanwhile, also seemingly lies ahead after an in-principle agreement was reached with the state Unions last week.
McLennan is by no means everyone's cup of Earl Grey, but he has been a fierce campaigner and defender of rugby in Australia, relentlessly banging the drum having witnessed its near return into "amateurism" first hand.
"The board's got to take a lot of credit, it's not just me, I might be the pointy end of the spear," McLennan told ESPN when asked to reflect on his work to help keep the game afloat.
"We've kept the patient alive, and we've transferred a new heart into it and the patient's coming good, and we'll absolutely get there. I'm convinced that with Eddie in there and Waughy as the CEO we're going to make the right calls. And on the commercial side, all of our partners want to renew and they like what they see with rugby.
"I actually see it very clearly, and I know we've underperformed and why [that has happened], but it just takes time. So all I'd say to anyone who cares about rugby is that it has taken us a little while to get to this position, and it will take a little bit to get out of it. But we're making the right calls."
A successful World Cup for the Wallabies, who commence their campaign against Georgia on Saturday week in Paris, would certainly help that -- no matter how fanciful that might appear given their efforts thus far in 2023.
"It provides a positive halo, and you want young kids to think that they can be a Wallaby or a Wallaroo when they grow up," McLennan said what a positive World Cup would do for Australian rugby.
"We want to do well, we're Australians and we want to win, and the public deserve for us to perform well; we've got to prove it to them, and we've got to get their trust back. But we're pretty committed and we're working night and day to make it happen."