On many occasions during his two years as head coach like Graham Henry in Wales Woodward has become frustrated

On many occasions during his two years as head coach, like Graham Henry in Wales, Woodward has become frustrated at having to do two jobs in one, and though he had nothing but praise for the licence and funding his World Cup preparations were accorded by the RFU, he believes that having the elite players controlled by the clubs, not from the centre, is tantamount to fighting the southern hemisphere countries, whose players are contracted to their boards and then loaned out to the clubs, with one arm tied behind your back.Top of England’s shopping list over the next six months might not then be a new elite performance director, who will not have anyone to direct, but a top- class hands-on international coach. It is probable that the England coach strongly proposed such a solution in his recent report on England’s World Cup campaign. The manager would deal with the politics and provide the best possible working conditions for the coach, who would have sole charge of the coaching and selection of the team. We want a successful England team and a professional structure beneath the national side which supports it, but one that also allows professional teams to be viable and vibrant.” Easier said than done, of course, even for England’s blue-eyed boy.At international level, Woodward is known to favour a return to the old-style division between coach and manager. He estimates pounds 100m has been thrown away already.”What rugby has to do is stand back and look at what we’ve done over the past four years, which has been headless-chicken stuff,” Andrew said recently “Let’s see what’s worked, what hasn’t and what we want I keep coming back to the same old theme.

One of Andrew’s priorities is to establish a financially sound base so that clubs no longer have to rely on the whims of their fast-buck owners. A blank piece of paper, a new team and an open wallet one moment, budget cuts, downsizing and unit costs the next. He was champion in 1997-98 with Newcastle, who came within days of being disbanded when Hall pulled his money out soon after and, following an uneasy mid-table time last year, are now languishing perilously close to the relegation zone in the Allied Dunbar Premiership. There is enough light blue in his background to placate the establishment, enough steel in his playing armoury to satisfy the workers and more than enough medals in his sock drawer, as player and coach, to guarantee respect from all quarters of the game and all sections of the media.Having accepted Sir John Hall’s vision of Newcastle Sporting Club, Andrew has been at the heart of professional rugby’s most celebrated experiment. Trial and error, with the accent on the latter.
Andrew’s credentials for brokering a realistic compromise between the various factions are close to being impeccable. Four years on from the dawn of the professional era would seem a relatively daft time to be considering the future, but that has always been the way with the northern hemisphere. But he will need the diplomatic skills of Henry Kissinger and the political astuteness of Peter Mandelson to reconcile the differing interests of club and country, amateur and professional.

On the one hand, he has Clive Woodward on his committee, whose idea of heaven would be to coach a squad of fully paid- up employees of the Rugby Football Union otherwise known as the England rugby team; on the other, Nigel Wray, one of the more committed and intelligent of the Allied Dunbar Premiership club owners, who wants to see some return on his considerable investment in the club game. As chairman of the task force delegated by Fran Cotton’s Club England to frame a competitive structure for the game over the next seven years, Andrew will have considerable influence on the way rugby responds to the crushing disappointment of the World Cup. ROB ANDREW is rapidly emerging as a key figure in the development of a coherent strategy for English rugby into the next millennium. It is killing ambition, especially among the younger players.. Too many players are earning comfortable money playing undemanding rugby.

Maybe the Task Force should grasp the nettle of professionalism, too We can afford only for the top teams to be paid The lower leagues should revert to being amateur. Not only will such a move help the smaller clubs to survive, it will give their players an incentive to improve and fight their way to the top. Three months should accommodate the Six Nations and the Heineken Cup, leaving the rest of the season for a British league.Whatever we decide to do with the top level of the game we must remember that we need a solid club structure below it. There would be plenty of selection arguments, but the results would be interesting.The season needs to be structured as well as the clubs. As Andrew says, three months duration for the Six Nations is much too long. Similarly, from England we could have Leicester, Bath and Saracens plus a wild- card XV chosen by Clive Woodward from Wasps, Harlequins and Newcastle.

We could help solve this by creating wild-card teams made up from the best players not involved.For instance, if Wales were allowed two clubs and one wild-card team we would have, say, Cardiff and Swansea plus a team chosen from the ranks of Llanelli, Pontypridd, Neath, Newport and the rest Graham Henry could be put in charge of it. But I like what I hear from Andrew, who has correctly pointed out that the much-vaunted Super-12 competition is not the cure-all.I’ve often said that the main reason that the Super-12 works is that those countries didn’t have a good club structure. We’ve got a great club tradition in place, but we are not making enough of it and perhaps we could do more by creating a few teams to beef up the standard of competition.There are continual arguments about how many teams from each country should be in the Heineken Cup and, invariably, there are good players whose clubs don’t make it and who are denied the benefits of this top- level experience. The English club structure needs a fixture boost as much as anyone and you can’t create rivalries like the old ones.Does he think the past 100 years of English rugby would have been helped by a weak Wales? Of course it wouldn’t – and neither will the next 100 And that applies to all the Five (now Six) Nations. Does he think that southern hemisphere rugby would be so powerful if all three of the leading countries weren’t so strong and competitive? I trust we can rely on a more enlightened approach from the Task Force.Not that it is going to be easy to create a structure from which the clubs and the national sides can gain maximum benefit. It hasn’t done much for the England team, has it? And neither is Loftus Road bulging at the seams. Apart from the welcome that awaits Wasps at Stradey Park in the return match, I believe Melville will find other reasons to regret his short-sightedness.And I certainly don’t share his faith in the Allied Dunbar, in which the standards aren’t all that great.