White knights a red rag to All Blacks

Sideline Cut: By Monday morning, Clive Woodward will either be the toast of Fleet Street or its latest figure of ridicule.

The memory of England's World Cup victory is already dimming and if his Lions selection take a pasting in Christchurch this morning, it will not be enough to prevent several hatchet jobs.

Should Woodward leave New Zealand with a Test-series victory, his reputation as a master thinker and strategist will be secure and he will be free to indulge his soccer ambitions and vanities at Southampton without fear of recrimination.

He is playing a dangerous game and that is why half the fascination of the Lions tour of New Zealand seems based not so much on affection for the team but the thrilling possibility that Woodward might be on the brink of screwing up gloriously.

Although Woodward is reputedly an engaging and friendly sort, it is impossible not to notice the tremendous sense of self-satisfaction he radiates. That half-smile, the certainty of tone and the public-school glee with which he celebrates tries all smack of a man awaiting a comeuppance.

There are many people, some English, who take a petty but nonetheless delicious pleasure in witnessing public figures like Woodward humbled. Back in his England days, that happened quite frequently and a couple of seasons before his metamorphic World Cup, he was in danger of being branded a ditherer, obsessively altering his team without advancing the overall cause.

But the World Cup conferred on him a degree of invincibility. In retrospect, the timing of England's 2003 victory was dangerously narrow: it was as if that England team were just weeks away from changing from a hard and experienced force into a mellow, declining one.

Jonny Wilkinson, perma-tanned and the chief mechanism for Woodward's laborious and grinding interpretation of rugby, has literally been falling apart since that famous November drop-goal finally transformed England into world champions of some bloody sport. Martin Johnson, his head bouncer, has retreated for the good life in Leicester. And several other of Clive's smart lads, most notably Steve Thompson, have suffered from serious dips in form since that moment of perfect organisation and cohesion and concentration.

But it was surely inevitable that Woodward would call on the survivors of that England team as he attempts to polish his standing in rugby by taking the All-Blacks' scalp, still the most prized of all.

The decision to place Wilkinson in the unfamiliar role of inside centre reeks of Woodward's self-belief and stubbornness and, some would argue, hubris. Equally, his silence over what has been tantamount to the exiling of Gavin Henson, the preening poster-boy of the Six Nations game, has done nothing to endear him to those Welsh who regard Henson as the new god of the valleys.

There is a general feeling the Lions fullback Jason Robinson is like a wind-up toy gone flat. In his heyday, the sight of Billy Whizz motoring through smashed Irish and Scottish defensive lines with his rather ugly but unquestionably fast running style was a cause of celebration. But even by 2003, other teams had learned that, rather than try to hunt the Whizz down, they could let him just run himself into a cul-de-sac, and he stopped becoming a source of scores.

Neil Back and Richard Hill are trading on reputations cemented under Woodward and form the nucleus of the entirely English backrow. So though the Lions jersey will be the familiar blood red this morning, the soul and philosophy of this team is English (the poor Scots represented only by the colour on the socks).

If Thompson and Matt Dawson are called into action from the bench, as seems likely in the second half, the Lions will have an even stronger feel of Swing Low, Sweet Chariot about them. Given that the injured Lawrence Dallaglio would definitely have been on this team, the occasion could have come close to a reunion of sorts for Clive and the boys he went to war with.

It could be argued that the coach has an obligation to go with what he knows and trusts and if he reflected the Six Nations trend by filling the team full of eye-catching but callow Welshmen, the consequences might have been disastrous. But if his England crew, two years older and rusty, implode today, it will inevitably provoke some revisionism on that 2003 achievement and lead to outright demands for a radical and new game plan for the second Test.

It is a funny thing that a Lions team led by an Irishman has not generated more heat in this country. Perhaps that is because Brian O'Driscoll evinces a kind of pan-national air of professionalism and also because Lions tours, since the sport went professional, have seemed less like patriotic occasions and more like lucrative challenge matches between absurdly talented clubs.

It would be wonderful to see O'Driscoll lighting up Christchurch this morning with the kind of effervescence and bravery that have made him one of Ireland's greatest sportsmen ever. And the transition of Shane Byrne from something akin to an adult mascot with a bad haircut into a first-choice Lion player is remarkable.

But while it may remain popular, the Lions tour does not seem to matter as deeply as in the amateur days, when, for instance, the exclusion of Simon Geoghegan from the 1993 touring party was regarded as a slur on the nation.

So surely the chief reason for tuning in is to see if Woodward has sent out a wreck of a team and if so, to witness just how horribly the All-Blacks might make them pay.

The New Zealand treatment of Jonny Wilkinson, whose body has failed to match the extreme demands he asks of it, is a grimly fascinating prospect. And even if the halt golden boy of the English game can handle the rigours of the All-Black pounding, it remains to be seen if he can still exert his bleakly mechanical and forceful kicking game at the highest level. After just a handful of relatively modest games with ordinary returns in the past two years, this is an extreme test of a man whose ultra-professional demeanour seemed to swallow his personality to the point where he was reduced to an unstoppable kicking machine in our minds.

It would be sad to see an athlete who has worked as hard as Wilkinson disintegrate in a game of this magnitude and profile. But the All-Blacks' aura, their tradition as a dark, unforgiving team, means people also expect and even hope they would seek out any sign of vulnerability and then just tear it up. The basic question comes down to whether Sir Clive and the remnants of his pale white knights are yesterday's men.

Clearly that is the belief of the Kiwi public, gathering in the Jade stadium this morning in expectation of a prolonged and vicious execution of the visitors.

And the All-Blacks would love nothing better than to bury England's World Cup heroes over and over. If a few Celts have to go down in the process, then so be it.