SYDNEY, March 4 : Stephen Larkham said he still has ambitions to coach at the test level despite signing a new deal with Super Rugby team the ACT Brumbies through to the end of the 2028 season on Wednesday.
The Brumbies top the Super Rugby Pacific standings after winning their first three matches of the season, backing up a first away win over the Canterbury Crusaders in 26 years with a victory over another New Zealand powerhouse, the Auckland Blues, last weekend.
Larkham’s stock has risen accordingly and he was even mentioned as an outside bet for the All Blacks job, but the former Wallabies and Brumbies flyhalf said he was happy to stay in his home city of Canberra for now.
“Obviously really excited to be with the Brumbies for the next two seasons,” the quietly spoken 51-year-old told reporters in the Australian capital.
“We’ve got a really good group of players here, a really good staffing group. I’m enjoying the way the boys are training and the performances that they’re putting on the field.
“The All Blacks job, whilst I was sort of honoured to be mentioned in that light, I think I’ve learned a lot from being in that environment, but it’s not an environment that I want to be in at the moment.
“The Brumbies are firmly in my focus at the moment.”
Larkham has been talked about as a future Wallabies coach since his first stint in charge of the Brumbies from 2014-2017.
He spent a lengthy spell as attack coach for the test team under Michael Cheika but carried the can, many believe unfairly, for a string of bad results and was sacked in early 2019.
After three years in Ireland as an assistant coach at Munster, he returned to the Brumbies in 2022 and has since helped the team remain Australia’s standard bearers in Super Rugby.
Joe Schmidt will be succeeded as Wallabies coach by Les Kiss after this year’s July internationals, but Larkham said he was still interested in testing himself at international level further down the line.
“I think those ambitions are warming a little bit,” he added.
“If I go back to before I left to go over to Ireland, I was still sort of developing as a coach. I feel that over the last four years, that’s really taken a turn for a positive and I’ve sort of got a better grasp of what’s involved.
“And so then once you sort of feel that you’re more comfortable at that level, and you start thinking about the next level.”
