Woodward gets down to the business of winning

Lions Tour: Clive Woodward may have learned some of his coaching techniques in the boardroom running his leasing company. Now he's refitting those ideas and flogging them back to the cream of UK business. Baggy shorts, ill-fitting shirts, poor food, eyesight and legal advice were just some of the problems snapping at the heels of English rugby before Sir Clive started radical blue-skies thinking.

His out-of-the-envelope restructuring took the Stanley Matthews-styled loose-fitting shirt and remodelled it as a spray on second skin, enough to turn Jason Robinson into Billy Whiz.

For this year's Lions tour, he also added a chef, a QC and Labour Party rottweiller Alistair Campbell to the employee list.

Woodward told business leaders yesterday how he had to overcome English "conservatism" in order to win the World Cup, although he didn't impart any current ideas for the re-education of Welsh, Scottish and Irish players on the Lions squad.

Woodward hired a coach to improve England player's eyesight and insisted on the tight-fitting shirt. He told 2,000 business people at the Institute of Directors annual convention in London yesterday the baggy shirts belonged to another era and showed clips of Robinson being tackled in the standard "take-a-decent-hold-of-me" cotton apparel and one of him scoring in the 2003 World Cup wearing the shiny soap-bar version.

Knighted after England's World Cup win, he added that England were "incredibly traditional" and told the business leaders he imagined himself in an empty white room (in some about-to-be relegated soccer club in the south of England?) after throwing everything out the window before reconsidering each detail as he rebuilt the room in his own design.

Remaining with his "winning-mindset" theme, Woodward said he looked for three qualities in a player, skill, leadership and warrior.

Think Martin Johnson, Lawrence Dallaglio and, eh Michael O'Leary.

For those who love to guess team line-ups before selection by the coach, happy days! Woodward also gave some hints to would-be punters when he said that a successful team needs at least four players with all three skills, another five with two of them and the rest having just skills.

Go figure.