Jake could teach Clive some things

The New Zealand commentators may have missed a trick when a disconsolate and beaten looking Jonny Wilkinson was helped from the field as the Lions imploded in the second half in Wellington this past weekend.

Maybe they wanted to be magnanimous in victory, something which they overdo to the point it becomes patronising, but surely someone, somewhere must have had the following words cross their mind: My, how the mighty have fallen.

Of course, the 30 point thrashing was not Wilkinson’s fault. He was just one player in the team, and he played no worse than those around him. Neither was it his fault that, rather idiotically, he was selected at inside centre as opposed to flyhalf for the first test.

That was the fault of Sir Clive Woodward. If anyone has seen his star wane in the past two years it is the former England World Cup winning coach. Unless something miraculous happens to change perceptions this weekend, Woodward will link up with football club Southampton in the next English Premiership season as a long forgotten rugby hero.

Just about everything that Woodward could get wrong on this Lions tour he has somehow succeeded in doing. Ultimately, the lesson that the 2005 British and Irish Lions experience would have given rugby is that it is still a sport where the less complicated route often suffices.

Woodward, from the day he was appointed as Lions coach, has over-complicated things. His management staff was way too big, his playing complement was even more unwieldly and unmanageable.

I am not sure if there were any problems with motivation among the players in the Lions camp who never got to play in the tests, but there were certainly a few things that Woodward might have learned had he gone to Springbok coach Jake White for advice (as opposed to the current tendency of it happening the other way around).

White burned himself just a bit when last year he called up the bare minimum number of players for his training camp before his first series against Ireland. There were several injuries during the month the players were together, which meant White had to call in under-prepared players from elsewhere shortly before test matches.

As a man who learns from his mistakes, this prompted White to make his squad bigger this year. But he did not take the Woodward route of making it massive. He rightly argues that when you have too many players you end up having too many hangers on who can become malcontents and thus impact negatively on the mood and focus of the squad.

It happened to some extent on the last end of year tour, where White was forced to go bigger than he would otherwise have by what appeared to be political considerations.

When you have a huge squad with you on a tour such as the one the Lions have undertaken, a coach is naturally pressed to give as many of those players as possible maximum chance to play.

That is particularly so when you are on a Lions tour, which means that the side has not played together in the past four years and you essentially have a new team made up of players who want to prove their credentials and stake a claim for the many positions that are open.

So instead of having the nucleus of his test team together for some of the key provincial games before the first test, as has happened on past Lions tours, Woodward went into the first test with a side that had not played together before. This was madness, particularly when the opponents were New Zealand.

And then, having lost the test by a significant margin, Woodward did what White always refuses to do: He panicked, and threw a number of new combinations together in a side that featured 11 changes.

Those changes might have brought a freshness that made a difference initially. The Lions did start like a whirlwind. But to win the war in the trenches against the All Blacks you need to have a hard-core nucleus of players who know each other and who can dig deep together when the mortars start flying.

As Woodward and his skipper pointed out afterwards, the Lions were brave and gutsy in the face of that heavy fire. Yet they never looked as organised as they should have been, and in 160 minutes of test rugby in what was supposed to be the big rugby event of the year, the Lions have yet to really look like a team.

Woodward is to blame for this. He is guilty of doing what he did not do for the several years during which he bit the bullet through England failure at the start of his tenure. He panicked under pressure, and he could not make up his mind on key positions.

His penchant for over-complication and his lack of decisiveness may not have cost the Lions the series, for they probably would have lost anyway. It did though help make the tour the rugby non-event of the new millennium.