After assisting the Sydney Roosters to grand final victory, Cheika now leads Lebanon to a second Rugby League World Cup before he returns to the helm of NSW's Super Rugby outfit.
Still the most recent person to coach an Australian team to a full Super Rugby title with his 2014 triumph, Cheika heads back to a club where he had a lot of success from 2013-2015, directly before taking on the Wallabies job.
Despite a wealth of experience in rugby, the veteran coach says he did a lot of learning in his short stint in the NRL.
"It's been crazy, It's like been going back to school," the former Wallabies coach said.
"I've been 27 years coaching, so to get all that new stuff in my head has just been so refreshing, even now starting to plan to go back to rugby, so many different ideas in my head."
When asked what he learnt from now four-time premiership winning coach Trent Robinson, the 2026 Roosters assistant struggled to put it into words.
"Don't think there'll be enough time in the press conference for that one," Cheika said.
"I'm very grateful to Trent and Nick Politis (Roosters chairman) for giving me that opportunity because it wouldn't have been easy to take a guy who hasn't coached in the detail before and then trust that guy to go and get that done for him."
The Roosters premiership success came just a year after leading the Leicester Tigers to a premiership final in England's PREM Rugby competition.
While there are some tactical changes, Cheika says his coaching style is constant when he swaps between the two codes.
"Helping guys get that little bit of extra motivation from the outside to go on and achieve their potential," is how Cheika describes his approach.
"That's something I really enjoy doing, and it's very similar across both games," he added.
With his Lebanon being one of the biggest underdogs in the World Cup, Cheika is leaning on the cultural ties that bind the Lebanese team together as he looks to inspire them to compete with much stronger nations.
"It's not easy when they're blasting that Lebanese music out so loud in the team room late at night, they've really jumped into the cultural bit very well.
"Everyone just sitting back, it was like you were in your mum's kitchen."
"Now I need to balance that scale with let's get a little angry for tomorrow night because we're going to need to be."
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