Praise be his second coming

The fat boy is slimmer again. He's leaner and hungrier looking, he's had his contractual dispute with the IRFU, he brought the house down at Lansdowne Road, he's plundered through Springbok forwards for a try, he's kicked a drop goal for Harlequins, he's fronting up RTE's stylish new advertisement for coverage of today's game. In short, Keith Wood is back.

Keith Wood has a spring in his step and the old glint in his eye again. And it's great to see. It's a far cry from last season when it transpires we weren't the only ones worrying for him. Keith Wood was concerned for himself. "I went through such a low last year when I was knackered after the Lions tour. I hadn't been fully fit going out there and I definitely wasn't fully fit when I came back injured. Then I had no time off and I was thinking `I'm retiring after the World Cup and that's the end of it'," says Wood, the memory of it almost etched on his face.

"I was wrecked and I wasn't enjoying it and that is the key to the game. Now, if I keep enjoying it and the body holds up, I still think I've five years left which - I'm 27 now - will take me to 32. And that's a respectable retirement age."

Despite his contractual dispute, his reception from the 12,000 or so Lansdowne Road crowd against Romania was "scary", forcing him to blush. On the face of it, he is an unlikely inheritor of the Simon Geoghegan mantle as darling of the crowd. Hookers and wingers are rarely interchangeable, while, as he says himself, he doesn't really have the "long, flowing blond locks".

He pauses at the thought of it. "I love playing at Lansdowne Road and I find it very difficult to explain to people how much I love Lansdowne Road. The first time I played in Lansdowne Road I remember pulling on my jersey in the dressing-room and thinking `no-one can ever take this away from me'. I had a lump in my throat. Jeez, it was just brilliant. And I jogged out on the pitch and I'd say for the first five or six yards I actually didn't touch the ground, I floated over the hallowed turf. It's just something incredibly special."

But for every Irish crowd and Harlequins crowd that adores him, there's a South African one which detests him. It may even be partly for the same reasons, because he plays the game with all his heart and body. The respect, admittedly, isn't so grudging as their coach, Nick Mallett, calls Wood the best hooker in the world.

"I've an opinion which is almost un-Irish. I believe you have to have a certain amount of arrogance and I know I do. I don't think it's a bad thing, but when you let it run riot and go that little bit too far, then I think it's a bad thing. And I found the South Africans to be very arrogant, and because I shoot off my mouth - as I'm doing now - they're offended by it and they want to stamp that out," he says. "And I don't mind that. I don't do it to bait them. When people say `what about you and (James) Dalton?', I don't go in for that sort of personal thing. It's just not my form."

Wood has no regrets about his contractual dispute, maintaining he was right. The ribbing about the dispute has been merciless. The `millionaire from Clare' and all that. In fact, he maintains there's little money to be made commercially from what remains a minority sport. He says he'd have to take any endorsement on its individual merits, but admits he may have a problem with, say, Durex, and jokes that his balding pate image mightn't be best suited to Brylcreem. "They've been beating down my door actually."

His ebullience grows in inverse proportion to his hair. For heaven's sakes, he's even dropping goals now. He admits to getting ribbed heavily for that drop goal for Harlequins recently, although at the same time beams when saying "it was a cracker".

Wood at cosmopolitan Harlequins and in the professional game is to the manor born.

"I love it there. It's a good place to live for a single guy. I don't know whether I'd want to bring up kids there."

He still has light blue Garryowen blood coursing through his veins, but: "Would I come home to play rugby? I honestly don't know."

Home now is 500 yards from the main ground in Twickenham and about five minutes away from Harlequins' training ground. His average day begins with meeting Jason Leonard for breakfast in a nearby cafe, training at 10, lunch and, depending on the day, mostly physio in the afternoon.

He spends most of his spare time reading or listening to music. The last two books he read were both sporting biographies, Tony Adams' Addicted and A Lot of Hard Yakka, a cricket book by Simon Hughes. "But I would read virtually anything. Before that I read the Lord of the Rings.

"I absolutely adore music. Kind of alternative, a lot of alternative, but I listen to anything. I love the music from the late 60s and early 70s. I love the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen - I love Bjork, that sort of music. I think the Fat Boy Slim album is an incredible album."

The professional life suits his mentality, though he's glad he worked in the real world as well. When Wood started out, he took on a lot of ball and took a lot of knocks. He received a fair old battering really. "I don't have a problem with what has been done. I wanted to do it, due to naivety or whatever. My worry is that the coaching has to be up there (raising his hands above his head) and I don't think we're coached that well, focused and channelled like they do in Australia."

He's probably played too many matches and still looks older than his 27 years. Game after game, season after season, he's thrown himself into everything, at times seeming reckless with his body, a body which he depends on to earn him his livelihood. So, is it a case of play now, pay later?

"I'm caught," he says, with a hint of exasperation. "I definitely am caught between the two. I really am looking after myself so much better now and I don't actually want to be running into contact all the time."

Sometimes he can't help himself though. It cuts out the complications. Ball in hand, opponent ahead, head down and go straight. Just thinking about being out on that pitch and he's starting to really warm to his theme now.

"I'm caught between the fact that if I totally throw down my game and play X, Y and Z sort of way, then I say `I'm not really Keith Wood any more. I'm not playing the way I want to play'. I want to enjoy myself. I love playing the game and I love carrying the ball and I know I do it well and I'm very happy about it and I want to get the buzz and I want to do all those sort of things. If I sanitise the way I play . . . " and the thought trails away, as if it's futile to think of himself as anything other than exactly what he is.

He feels his dodgy shoulders on cold mornings, but apart from that says he's still in pretty good nick. He has at least been able to change his lifestyle, especially his "appalling diet" of yore. No more junk food, instead he prefers to cook his own pasta dishes and eat salad, fish, vegetables. He's even given up pizza, the poor fellow, and confines drinking to Saturdays only.

This season is the first season he says he has really enjoyed training while remaining relatively injury-free. The two Tests against South Africa apart, he was able to train hard over the summer without a shoulder injury or anything else to hold him back. He lost a stone, and has since put on nine pounds again. But around the neck and face he looks less, well: "It's okay, you can say it - fat."

He wants to win something with Harlequins, preferably more than one thing, and something with Ireland - "a Triple Crown, a Championship or a Grand Slam or a World Cup."

There's also that elusive first Five Nations win for Wood, not exactly making him unique. He dismisses it, on the grounds that it cannot be a personal goal as opposed to a team goal. "It's not something that kills me. I do want to do it, and we will do it this year. Definitely."

Starting today? The realist that is Wood says: "I think we can honestly go out and have a good chance of winning. That's where we are. We've a good chance. I wouldn't get caught up in the hype over Ulster. It is a great thing. The guys have got the confidence, but it still means we have to go out and do everything right. Like, everything absolutely right, and then the bounce of the ball still has to go our way, and then we'll win. Anything less than that, and we'll be struggling to win."

Still ever the realist.