With his reputation in rugby assured and his multimillion-dollar business no longer needing his daily attention, Rod Macqueen could afford to start relaxing. But only a fortnight after his 60th birthday – and almost a decade of rebuffing any coaching offer that came his way – the World Cup-winning coach will instead plunge back into coaching for elite rugby’s newest team, the Melbourne Rebels.

Macqueen was feted for his four years with the Wallabies for winning 34 of 43 matches – an average of 79 per cent – yet deliberately stayed away from coaching since leaving that role in 2001. ”If you retire when I did, at the end of a World Cup, you have your fair share of offers. But it’s fair to say I’m not a career coach,” he said yesterday.

Macqueen said he began regaining his interest in coaching while assisting the Rebels during their involvement in the defunct Australian Rugby Championship in 2007. And three months of wooing by the Super 15 club’s chairman, influential advertising executive Harold Mitchell, persuaded the Sydneysider to accept the dual role of head coach and director of coaching.

Despite the nine-year break, Macqueen never lost touch with the game. ”I’ve made a point of staying out of coaching, and I’ve tried to make a point of not criticising the Australian team as well, but I’ve also been very involved in rugby the whole way through … with the International Rugby Board, and I’ve been looking at the laws of the game. I’ve probably been following the nuances of the game, in a lot of ways, more than I would have been if I was actually coaching,” he said.

”Being a private consortium adds a lot of appeal to me because it takes away the politics, and allows you to get on with the job.”

Macqueen’s assistant will be Damien Hill, a triple premiership-winning coach with Sydney University. While Macqueen’s appointment as director of coaching could point to an eventual handover of the head-coach role to the 39-year-old Hill, Macqueen stressed he would fill both positions for the duration of his three-year contract. The Rebels have 13 months to put together a squad before their debut in the expanded Super 15 competition.

Macqueen was the foundation coach of the ACT Brumbies in 1996. His ability to take the team to the final of the then Super 12 competition in its second season was rewarded with the Wallabies appointment in 1997.

His challenge to build the Rebels squad will be hampered by Australian Rugby Union rules to curb the number of Australian players the fledgling club can sign to prevent an exodus from interstate clubs.

”With the Brumbies [in the ’90s], we basically only found out about it in November the year before, and we had to put a team together [in five months] but … everyone was putting a team together for the first time. Now, we’ve got a competition that’s been established for [more than] 10 years … so it’s not going to be that easy,” he said.

”One of the things we want to do as a club is keep players in Australia. We’ve got a fairly large player drain in rugby union, with players going over to other countries, and hopefully we’ll be able to stop some of that and bring them to Melbourne.”