Where Trevor Bayliss and Eddie Jones were suspicions, Wayne Bennett has confirmed a trend. Australian brains are a thing. And it's not just that Australians have been placed at the bridge of the mother country's mother ships; it's the type of Australians that have been chosen.

Bayliss, Jones and Bennett conform to a specialised sub-genus of the Australian sporting coach. They are not loquacious, prolix over-explainers. They are not Alan Jones. Nor are they martinets or control freaks. They are not Ricky Stuart. They have not rewritten the coaching manual. They are not Bob Simpson. Rather, they are mystics, riddles wrapped in enigmas wrapped in tracksuits. Their common ancestor is the medicine man of beloved memory, Jack Gibson.

Cricket's Bayliss has imparted his wisdom, down the years, less through words than through a certain gnomic acumen. I googled 'Trevor Bayliss quotes', and the most weighty I could find was, apropos Glenn McGrath, "Glenn's not going to be around beyond the next few years". Cricketers from New South Wales speak very highly of Bayliss' instincts and quiet laying-on-of-hands interpretation of cricket's secrets, without being able to remember any sentence he has ever uttered. After Bayliss' arrival in the English dressing-room sparked the mother of all Ashes turnarounds last year, Alastair Cook joked, "He's only just turned up; let's not give him too much credit". Nor could he be easily identified from a line-up. But by their South African tour, although nobody could remember Bayliss saying or doing much, when he made a fairly anodyne lunchtime comment in Johannesburg that the English team would do well to take their chances, a reverent Cook described it as an inspirational "kick up the arse" that changed the course of the series.

Eddie Jones is another to speak softly but carry a big smirk. His actions so far as England rugby coach – appointing as captain a player with a longer rap sheet than John Hopoate, lifting bans on drinking alcohol and column-writing (good one Eddie, the two do go together) – suggest a Jolly Roger ride on the high seas. As anyone who followed Jones as Wallabies, Queensland and Japan coach could see, he was a leader who conjured a fog of words, much of it gibberish, as a screen for a kind of sly, calculating, and sometimes infectious confidence. A perfect communicator for players sitting in a circle with glazed eyes, Jones was a weaver of spells. It's not about the words; it is, as Dennis Denuto put it, all about the vibe.

If any modern coach carries and conveys the vibe, it is the skinny one. Can Bennett's dark charisma be cross-cultural? It crossed state lines and worked at Kogarah. Briefly it transcended the Tasman. Can it travel the globe? Quite likely, because the Bennett genius, while as Queensland as Golden Circle pineapple rings, has something spiritual about it. All of his best-known one-liners, such as "Don't die with the music in you", taken from American self-help author Wayne Dyer, are proof of the adage that good coaches borrow while great coaches steal. Bennett, like Bayliss and Jones, has a knack for taking a few words and transforming them into laparoscopic incisions, cutting right through to the player's innards at, most crucially, the precise moment when the player is listening. Coaching is an art, not a science, and these three Australians are all a certain kind of artist.

History shows, also, that Australian exports to Britain have included the other kind of artistry. Our honest merino wool might have kept the northern mills aweaving, but Australia's other greatest primary export to Britain, metals and mining shares, were responsible for some of history's finest scams. The Great Northern Copper Mining Company of South Australia, with the colony's governor named on its board, raised 50,000 pounds from London in 1859. It was nothing more than an abandoned shaft. Coolgardie's Golden Hole, one of 690 West Australian gold mines floated on the London sharemarket around 1900, raised 467,000 pounds in speculative money; all flowed into the pockets of the promoters who implanted gold in the samples and covered the hole with concrete before the British realised they had been duped. In that gold rush, credulous British investors lost 20 million pounds to Australian salesmen. They just couldn't stop believing in us.

So will this trio of Australian coaches end up being a golden fleece or a golden hole? The English should be congratulated for moving beyond parochialism. It's something we Australians have struggled to do. Indeed, since our adventures with a South African cricket coach, a New Zealand rugby coach, an English athletics coach and an eternity of European soccer coaches, Australia has entered a jingoistic rebound, where the current wisdom is that some inborn connection with the national culture is integral to successful coaching. Whether that's hooey or not, it's interesting that England is moving in the opposite direction.

Forecasts? The safe bet is that they will end badly, because that's what coaching gigs do. I tip Jones to enjoy some heady days but get eaten by pirahnas before the next World Cup. Bayliss has already achieved enough to ensure that when the time comes he will have another job to move on to. And Bennett – whatever happens, win or lose, he will wriggle free with his reputation enhanced, because that is what Bennett does. In the long run, they all provide England with a win-win. Succeed, and they bring trophies; fail, and they prove satisfyingly that colonials were never the right stuff in the first place.