His man-management skills are such that he has been able to transfer the team captaincy twice in the last year without becoming the target of recriminatory headlines. But you don’t get to the threshold of a Grand Slam without being something more than simply one of the chaps.
“He was the sort of person that you never really got too close to,” said Paul Dodge, who formed a celebrated centre-threequarter partnership with him for Leicester, England and the Lions throughout the early 1980s. “You’d think you knew him, but when you sat down and really thought about it, you didn’t.”Inscrutability is no bad quality in a leader of men, as long as it is combined with an ability to enthuse and inspire Not everyone, of course, can be persuaded to fall into line. There will always be the occasional Richard Cockerill, who objected to receiving an e-mail that read: “If you insist on continuing to play with England the style of rugby you play with Leicester, I cannot pick you.” But Woodward’s ability to pick himself up from the demoralising experience of England’s elimination from the 1999 World Cup at the quarter-final stage, and to carry largely the same bunch of players to the brink of greater achievements, form the mosteloquent tribute to his resilience and his motivational ability.His other salient characteristic is an independent spirit. “That’s Clive,” people often say when they’re discussing his behaviour, as if any further attempt at analysis would be a waste of time.

Perhaps his bosses, behind the closed doors of Twickenham’s committee rooms, say something else when confronted with fresh evidence of his insistence on going his own way.”He’s very single-minded, very autocratic, and probably unmanageable,” said another old teammate, Peter Wheeler, now Leicester’s chief executive “That would give some people a lot of problems. What he’s saying is: ‘I’m the England coach, and this is what I’m going to do If I don’t produce the goods, sack me Otherwise let me get on with it.’ That’s his attitude. And that will always cause difficulties, especially in a game run by councils and committees. These are people who are accountable for costs and performance to their members, and they like to feel that they’ve got a handle on what’s being done and what’s being spent They’d like to have some accountability for it. Clive prefers to do it his way.”And Clive’s way, to the chagrin of some Rugby Football Union purse-string pullers, is the five-star way.

In 1998, for instance, on the infamous “Tour to Hell”, he took exception to the quarters reserved in a Cape Town Holiday Inn and decamped to the city’s finest hotel, putting the whole squad on his personal AmEx card and sending Twickenham the bill. A year later, the World Cup preparation involved not just an over-publicised training session with the Royal Marines in Devon but also a three-week warm-weather workout in a luxury resort off the Queensland coast.It was that kind of apparent self-indulgence which allowed Brad Johnstone, then the Fiji coach, to make his famous jibe about “15 guys with nothing more than a rugby ball playing against 15 guys with laptops and fast cars”. But Peter Wheeler sees it as Woodward’s way of establishing a certain level of demand and expectation. “Clive sets great store by demanding professionalism from the players in every way, but he’s also committed to giving them the best possible facilities and expertise to help them produce their best, incorporating their families and everything No expense is spared. His critics would say that he spends too much money on that side of things.

But it generates great loyalty and commitment from the players.”A successful business career presumably gives Woodward not just a high credit rating but also the confidence to back his own judgement. Less easy to understand is a gift for self-contradiction which somehow forms the link between the independence and the inscrutability, and which baffles even those who imagine that they know him. His recent statements about his future with England – saying, on the day before the game in Rome, that he wouldn’t tour South Africa in the summer without a new contract, and then saying something completely different after the match -rendered his mentality even more opaque than before.While there seems to be no guile behind the confusion, there is also a sense that this is a man with a hinterland “He keeps his private life away,” Dodge said. What we do know is that Clive Ronald Woodward was born 44 years ago in Ely, Cambridgeshire, to a service family, and educated at HMS Conway Cadet College in Anglesea and at Loughborough College, where he qualified as a teacher of physical education. On graduating, he joined Rank Xerox as a trainee salesman and Leicester Tigers as a hot-shot centre.At Welford Road he was coached by the legendary Chalkie White, whose squad included not just Dodge and Wheeler but also Dusty Hare, Les Cusworth and, eventually, Rory Underwood. “I don’t know what it was that Chalkie had,” Dodge remembered, “but he could get everybody to play. He was full of ideas for back moves, always interested in trying new things.

And with the backs he had, he could do those things.”"We were very pleased when Clive arrived,” Wheeler said. “He wasn’t a local man, and he’d already had a run-out with Harlequins. He was a good player – he had pace and skill, and although he certainly wasn’t what you’d call a stocky player, his defence was always good His speed allowed him to close people down. I guess he wasn’t unlike Will Greenwood,although not as tall.”Woodward slotted in at outside centre, quickly forming a durable partnership with Dodge. “We played an open, expansive style of rugby that inspired everyone,” Wheeler continued “We scored a lot of tries from all over the place.