Next Wallabies coach Les Kiss: a mongrel mix of league and union, coach and strategist
Les Kiss was an injured rugby league winger looking down the barrel of retirement and a day job flogging poker machines when the idea of a career in coaching struck. The art of gelling many disparate personalities into one united team intrigued him. 'On the sideline I saw the game differently,' he realised. 'I started thinking deeply.'
The ex-North Sydney Bear turned Queensland Reds boss has plenty to think on now, having been appointed as Wallabies coach from mid-2026. The 60-year-old must now unpuzzle one of the greatest brain strainers in Australian sport: how to return the Wallabies – a rugby superpower now ranked eighth in the world – to greatness.
That challenge falls to a man who has never played a rugby union game in his life. The Bundaberg boy's coaching career is neatly split between 30 years in league – including four Origins for Queensland and four Tests for Australia – and almost as long coaching union, including key roles with the Ireland and South Africa squads.
Yet Wednesday's announcement, after a three-month recruitment drive, is welcome news to Australian rugby fans. In Kiss they have a face and philosophy to hang their hopes on in the Wallabies' quest to win the 2027 World Cup on home soil. They also get the reassurance of current coach Joe Schmidt continuing after the British & Irish Lions tour this winter and the Rugby Championship Tests in Spring.
Schmidt, who has patched the Wallabies' wounds with a 6-7 win-loss record in 2024, had initially intended to hand over the reins before the Wallabies' revenge mission to Tokyo on 25 October. There, Australia are slated to take on a Japan side coached by Eddie Jones, the ex-Wallabies coach whose diabolical nine-month reign delivered the men in gold to the doldrums of a pool-stage elimination at the 2023 World Cup.
However, despite caring for a son with severe epilepsy at home in New Zealand, Schmidt will coach on until June 2026 to allow Kiss to finish his three-year contract with the Reds, joining forces to co-marshall the Wallabies' tilt at the inaugural 2026 Nations Championship between the best sides in Europe and the rest of the world.
Unlike the torrid baton changes between five Wallabies coaches these past six years, this extended transition from Schmidt to Kiss should be smooth. The two are old friends and both cool heads who did this handover in reverse when Schmidt took the Ireland head coach role in 2013 after Kiss had filled in as interim boss for two Tests.
Calm, cunning and clever, Kiss was already a coach to watch. After joining Ireland as defensive coach in 2009, he transformed Declan Kidney's side into the world No 1, inspiring a first Six Nations grand slam in 61 years. Schmidt took what Kiss built and won three more titles, including a second grand slam in 2018.
That golden Schmidt-Kiss era at Ireland also forged a battalion of players that turned beating the All Blacks into a habit, a feat the Wallabies haven't managed this century. If Kiss can win back the 2026 Bledisloe Cup – a trophy not smeared with Australian fingerprints since 2002 – before conquering the world in 2027, his legend is assured.
Kiss is a uniquely Australian mongrel mix of league and union, coach and strategist. At the Bears, the wiry winger had speed and scored tries but tackling was his forte. Kiss was a small man who hit very big. It's why Frank Ponissi, the Melbourne Storm director of football for 17 years, tipped him into a gig with the Springboks in 2001.
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A six week stint as defence coach lasted two years and earned Kiss his start in union. The diehard leaguie loved rugby's alchemy of different sizes and shapes of players. Impressed, 1991 World Cup-winning Wallabies coach Bob Dwyer brought Kiss home as his Waratahs second-in-command in 2002. A one-year coaching contract was renewed six times.
Work ethic is a Kiss a trademark. Wayne Bennett taught him that representing your state or country isn't a summit but a base camp. You've earned the jersey, but you haven't won anything. That 'words aren't deeds' ethos fuelled a long apprenticeship in Europe, a decade in Ireland then five years coaching London Irish in England.
Since coming home and taking over the Reds in 2024, Kiss has blossomed quickly. Last year the Reds finished fifth, their best Super Rugby result since 2013. This year they sit fourth with a 6-3 record built on a blitzkrieg defence that is drawing record crowds – a ray of sunshine for a code stuck in a 25-year storm of debt and defeat.
Now the die is cast. Despite Kiss having no international clause in his Reds contract, RA has bypassed two highly-credentialed former Wallabies assistants in Waratahs coach Dan McKellar and Brumbies boss Stephen Larkham to elevate a league winger to the top job in Australian rugby union. Kiss the Kangaroo is now the Wallabies coach.
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