Michael Foley: Flavour of the month down under

Michael Foley has developed the most formidable pack in the Premiership at Bath, and is considered by many to be an Australia coach in waiting - a job that has just fallen vacant

The calculation is simple: Bath's pack plus Australia's back division might well equal a second Heineken Cup title for the West Countrymen, regardless of what the cutting-edge attacking maestros of Toulouse might have to say about the matter, and would certainly have saved Eddie Jones from the bum's-rush treatment he received in Sydney yesterday.

If Bath cannot score tries no matter how much ball they secure, the Wallaby runners manage at least one a game despite the starvation rations provided by their powder-puff forwards. A successful fusing of the two would have spared the silver-tongued former hooker the humiliation of trying, and failing, to schmooze his way back into the affections of his employers.

In recent weeks, one of the furtive fascinations surrounding the parlous state of Wallaby rugby - a whitewash in the 2005 Tri-Nations tournament, followed by three defeats in four Tests on their recent European tour - has been the quiet search for Jones' successor. Now he has been sacked, the effect on the small, not-so-perfectly formed green-and-gold coaching community is seismic. Vacancies will be created, important positions will require filling. Suddenly, all things are possible.

Not least for Michael Foley, another former hooker who won a World Cup winner's medal with Australia in 1999 and, after helping his mother country see off the British and Irish Lions two years later, surfaced at Bath to learn the coaching trade. Within weeks, he was top dog. Within a few more weeks, he realised he required some help with the man-management and internal politics, and talked his old mentor John Connolly into starting a new life at the Recreation Ground. Thus relieved of what might be described as the arse-ache end of the job, he set about building the most formidable forward pack in Premiership rugby - a feat that has not gone unnoticed back home. Despite having never coached in Australia, he is now widely considered an Australia coach in waiting.

With Jones disappearing into the past tense, Foley is among the flavours of the month down under - and not just with the Wallabies, either. Queensland are keen on his services - if the bush telegraph has it right, they have already made an approach - and even though his Bath contract runs through to the end of next season, there seems little doubt that the Aussies will get their man one way or another, probably quite soon. "My family are well settled here and I feel a deep attachment to the players, but I do have long-term ambitions to go back," Foley acknowledged this week.

Life is bowl of cherries, then? Not quite, for these are difficult times. Not as difficult as the dark days of 2002 - things will have to go horribly awry on the banks of the Avon for the most successful of all English clubs to reach the last game of the current campaign stalked by the spectre of relegation - but awkward all the same. Bath failed to win any of their four Premiership games during the autumn international window, when they donated pretty much the whole of their tight unit to the England cause, and as a result, they find themselves in the bottom four.

What is more, Connolly has said his goodbyes and business-classed his way back to Brisbane, leaving Foley to fly by the seat of his pants until Brian Ashton, the radical savant of the game in England, returns to the club as director of rugby on 1 January. And as sod's law would have it, his first game in solo mode is something of a tester: a winner-take-all Powergen Cup set-to with Gloucester this evening, with a semi-final place at stake.

"When Brian arrives, I'll happily return to my back-seat role, if that is what it was," Foley said. "Good coaches shape the way a squad thinks, and Brian is a very good coach. He has tremendous expertise in an area of rugby, the attacking game, where we need to be challenged, so I believe the transition from John to Brian will be seamless. Does the change worry me? Not at all. I believe I'm a better coach for working with John because he showed me the importance of the intuitive aspects of the job, by which I mean the personal touches, the capacity to treat people like people. I hope to develop that further when Brian gets here."

Unsurprisingly, given their long and successful relationship, Foley gives his countryman enormous credit for his work at the Rec, despite his failure to secure a title of any description during his residency. "Let me tell you this," he said. "There has been an incredible amount of change at this club, change that would not have been instigated and managed without John. I think I understood exactly how much needed to be changed during my first months here, but I've never been one to kid myself and I knew I needed some support. John was the perfect choice, because he had the ability to make the players feel comfortable with him while having the strength to put pressure on senior management, which is very important in this organisation.

"I was learning on the hoof and getting some things wrong. John took the steam out of the situation and put things on track. When he arrived, a couple of us had spent weeks putting together a training plan for the off-season. It wasn't any old plan; we'd mapped out every last detail, right down to minutes and seconds, and covered the walls with bits of paper outlining what drills we'd run in each part of a session. Believe me, we took those bits of paper seriously. The Magna Carta was nothing by comparison. John walked in, took one look at it all and said: 'Shit, that's too complicated for me. Let's do something else.' I was rigid, he was flexible. And he was right. Being a competitive kind of bastard, I wanted to know everything he knew instantly. It couldn't be done, of course, but he taught me a lot.

"Those early days on my own were hard and I still have some scar tissue, but I've come through pretty well. As John once told me: 'If it doesn't kill you, it will make you stronger.' Yes, we've had some poor results recently; yes, I recognise we should be scoring more tries, and winning more matches, with the amount of ball we're getting. However, I would also say that we're more equipped to the next level than we were three years ago. Could it be better? Of course. Will it be better? Definitely."

Publicly, Foley blames the failings of Bath's back division on disruption, largely through injury but partly through the absence of Olly Barkley, the creative spark behind the scrum, on international duty. "Our forward play is better than our back play purely because of stability and experience," he said. "There is no lack of endeavour outside the scrum, but there is sometimes a lack of cohesion. Disruption affects rhythm."

Privately, he wonders whether the unforgiving structure of the English season militates against the exhilarating brand of back play associated with the Stephen Larkhams, Lote Tuqiris and Chris Lathams of Wallaby land. Destabilising Test call-ups, the threat of relegation, winter mud ... these are horrors unknown to the tracksuited breed in Australia, and as a coach of considerable ambition, he craves a positive environment when he sees one. There is also a notion that at Bath, the rugby side of the operation is light years ahead of a notoriously cautious and tight-fisted business side in terms of ambition. Naturally enough, Foley refused to be drawn on this one.

He was, however, prepared to offer an opinion on Australia's declining fortunes as a union nation. "I think Eddie Jones is an exceptional coach," he said. "When Rod Macqueen coached us to the world title in '99, he had one hell of a lot of help from the coaching structure at Super 12 level. Eddie was with the ACT Brumbies, John was with Queensland. They were so good at developing players that when Rob got hold of them, he didn't have to do too much. When Eddie found himself in the No 1 job, he didn't have that quality of support. During this last tour, he was trying to bring people up to Test speed who hadn't really proved themselves in Super 12."

This was no doubt one of the points Jones raised in his own defence, but it was not sufficient to get him off the hook. There are already names in the frame to replace him - Ewen McKenzie, David Nucifora and the wily Connolly, who just happens to be back in the country - but Foley is among the candidates for a top provincial job at the very least. His forthcoming association with Ashton could, and should, be mutually enriching. Whether it lasts more than a few weeks remains to be seen.