Already boasting the world's most decorated dual-code coaching CV, Cheika plans on taking the Waratahs to the title in his first season back in charge following successful stints with Argentina and the Sydney Roosters.
"I'm coming here to get this team to try and win the comp. Like, isn't that what we want to do at the end of the day? That's it," Cheika said on Wednesday, some 12 and a half years after coaching the Tahs to their one and still only crown.
"I've always been like this. What you do now and where you are now - how you perform - even when I was a player overseas - is what's important.
"Like I'd have a one year contract. If I play good, well then I'm in charge. if I play rubbish, you can get rid of me. That's fair."
No beating around the bush, the straight-shooting mentor insisted he didn't need any great luring back to Daceyville, despite the Waratahs missing the finals for a third straight Super Rugby Pacific season, twice under Dan McKellar after claiming the 2023 wooden spoon under Darren Coleman.
"If you've got to be persuaded by someone to do a job, or to be the coach of a team, that means you don't want to do it," he said after finishing his Rugby League World Cup gig with Lebanon on Sunday, a month after bowing out gloriously as assistant at Trent Robinson's newly-crowed NRL premiers.
But while there is very much a 2014 feel returning to the Tahs, with veteran halves Bernard Foley and Nick Phipps also back and Cheika hiring fellow title winners Stephen Hoiles and Wycliff Palu as assistant coaches, the boss reckons that's where the romance ends.
"You don't want to watch old videos. You want to make your own movies," Cheika said.
"This group here hasn't got it like when I took over these fellas when they were playing for the Waratahs. They had more international players inside of the team, so they'd experienced a different level of playing.
"Now we've got maybe five or six over on the Wallaby tour in total, so there's a little less experience.
"It's also a different time, more than 10 years later. There's just different ways of our footy, so I want to show them something new.
"I want do things differently because I want to get a different outcome."
Should he again live up to his own lofty expectations, Cheika will have penned another triumphant chapter in an already unrivalled career.
He was the first to coach rugby teams to major titles in the southern and northern hemispheres, guiding Leinster to their first Heineken Cup trophy in 2009 before repeating the feat at the Waratahs.
He was the first to coach the Pumas to the Rugby World Cup semi-finals and crowned world coach of the year after taking the Wallabies to the 2015 final.
Among other achievements, Cheika coached Randwick to the 2005 Shute Shield, was the first to coach Argentina to a win over the All Blacks in NZ and led Lebanon to the rugby league World Cup quarter-finals in 2022 for the first time.
But a second Wallabies stint is not his motivation.
"I want to be really clear about this, right, because I knew that'd come up," Cheika said.
"There's no springboards. There's no 'I'm going here to get there'. There's no 'I'm coming here to get this team'.
"I'm here to try and win the comp."
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