Cheika happy to 'fly the flag' for Lebanon

While Cheika grew up watching both rugby codes, he concedes that there are challenges to swapping back and forth between the two.

His last role in the 15-a-side game was with Leicester Tigers for the 2024-25 season and he will return to the Waratahs, where he won a title in 2014, for next year's Super Rugby campaign.

Fluent in Arabic, French and Italian, he likens the process to moving between languages.

"You find out there's different grammar, different sentence construction. There's different emphasis on words or different accents, but at the end of the day, the values of what the player needs to have, those things are the same.