If he'd have been the bad cop you'd have expected Cheika to arrive in a clown's suit.

But arrive in a suit he did.

An Armani one. A handful of scribes arrived up at a trial game for Ireland's tour to Japan at Merrion Road and it was there Cheika outlined his philosophy. "We've got to be multi-skilled in everything we do, " said the Australian that day. "We're very much about player evolution, we've got to make the players better. If we make the players more skilled and fitter then we'll be able to play the same game longer and more consistently and success is going to be a consequence of that. We're very much into a 15-man game, we want all our forwards to carry the ball. We play a continuity style but we're not naive."

As manifestos go, he's made a decent fist of fulfilling his. It is, for example, difficult to think of a Leinster player who hasn't evolved under Cheika's regime. Some have improved immeasurably. Girvan Dempsey could always catch a ball and run competently in straight lines but under Leinster's current regime he began hitting the line at all sorts of intelligent angles. Gordon D'Arcy has been transformed from an outside-centre masquerading one position in-field to a genuine number 12. Jamie Heaslip has progressed from a number eight with promise to a player who has already gone some way to fulfilling it.

Cheika has also given the youth in his squad every possible opportunity. Despite protests from some within the Leinster system, the Australian fast-tracked Rob Kearney into the first-team on his arrival at Donnybrook and the former Clongowes boy is a better player for it. It's a similar situation with Luke Fitzgerald. No other coach in Irish rugby would have selected him for front-line duty just a year out of school but Cheika has managed him well and it will benefit his career.

Then there are Leinster's galacticos. Felipe Contepomi has always been an instinctive footballer but he's played the best rugby of his career under Cheika in the past 30 months. As for Brian O'Driscoll, the only reason he's still playing his club rugby in Ireland is because of the Cheika and Knox regime. "I really enjoy going to training every day with the boys (Michael Cheika and David Knox), " said O'Driscoll in an interview with the Tribune this time last year, just before he signed a contract with the IRFU until the end of the 2011 World Cup.

"For a couple of years I was going through the motion of training and just looking forward to games whereas now, I'm really enjoying the training. When Michael and David came in, I gave them an opportunity to see what things would be like. Before they came in, I felt things were going a little bit stale, but they've really refreshed things.

I feel that I'm learning about the game again and about being a captain. And I really liked the brand of rugby we are playing, too."

Who doesn't? Alongside Llanelli and Toulouse, Leinster play the best brand of rugby in Europe. It's instinctive, intelligent and easy on the eye but there's just one problem at the moment. As happy as everyone appears within the squad . . . there hasn't been so much of a whisper of discontent in the Leinster camp of late . . . coaches are ultimately judged on success and Cheika has yet to deliver.

The Magners League slipped from the province's grasp on the back of a number of understated performances at the tail-end of last season, a period when the coach came in for some sustained criticism.

It many ways it was truly ironic, truly Irish. Cheika got pillared for narrowly failing to win a competition he decided to take seriously while other provincial coaches were left untouched by the critics even though they'd treated the league like a series of inconsequential friendlies.

This season, they haven't lost too much ground as of yet in the Magners League to make a title challenge inconceivable in the coming months, and the Heineken Cup gets underway next weekend. In Cheika's two campaigns to date, Leinster reached the semis in 2006 and quarters last season but the unfortunate thing for the coach this time around is that having assembled the strongest pack since he became Leinster coach in 2005, his team now find themselves in the toughest pool they've possibly ever encountered in the competition. Work out all the calculations and the only way you can see Leinster guaranteeing themselves a quarter-final slot is by winning five games. Four wins and a nice collection of bonus points, might, just might, be enough for qualification but it's a big ask.

At least the indicators are positive. You always got the feeling that Cheika looked at the Munster pack with envy over the past two years but with Ollie Le Roux, Leo Cullen and Shane Jennings now in the set-up, he now possesses a forward eight capable of causing damage all on their own. Against Ulster last weekend, Leinster's pick-and-drive game was extremely effective and once their internationals backs get back up to speed with what everybody else around them is doing, they'll pose their opponents a doublepronged problem.

Which is probably what Cheika wanted to achieve from the moment he arrived at Leinster. It's taken him twoand-a-bit seasons to get here but questions remain as to whether he'll be around for much longer once his contract expires in the summer. On that afternoon back in 2005 when he made his media bow, Cheika gave an insight into his view on coaching. "I've got a clothing company so this is not a job or career for me, this is a passion, " he said back then.

In various other interviews he's re-iterated the point that this role at Leinster is a project for him, not necessarily a career. So will he and David Knox still be around next season?

"We're well aware that their contracts are up at the end of the season but it's a bit early for talks right now, " says Mick Dawson, the Leinster chief executive. "It is something, though, that will be discussed in the near future."

You get the feeling that Leinster want to hold onto the pair . . . they'd be mad not to . . . but which makes this upcoming Heineken Cup campaign so important. If Leinster sink without trace, Cheika might well lose his appetite for the task. If they perform, he could be tempted to extend his project by another year or two.

There's a lot more riding on this Heineken Cup campaign for Leinster than simply results.