Chris Hewett: Who will (and won’t) gain Lions share from Woodward

According to the latest figures, Terminal 4 at Heathrow Airport handles more than 14 million passengers a year.

As Sir Clive Woodward plans to take very nearly this number on the British and Irish Lions tour of New Zealand next month, there could not be a more appropriate venue for an initial gathering of the red-shirted multitudes on Monday morning.

It is here that Woodward will announce his squad - by some distance the most populous in Lions history - and if he reads through the names quickly, everyone should be home by nightfall.

A minimum of 44 players will get the trip - Woodward may yet stretch a point already extended to breaking by picking 45 - and will leave the UK on 25 May together with a back-room staff totalling the best part of 30, including a tour manager as well as a team manager, a chief executive, a lawyer, two doctors, three physiotherapists, two video analysts and a couple of chefs, one to cook the meals and another, Alastair Campbell, to roast the media.

Oh yes, there is also a coaching team in double figures.

As Winston Churchill nearly said: "Never in the field of rugby conflict was so much spent by so few on so many."

Forty-four players? If you look at it another way, it amounts to precisely half the British and Irish internationals on duty in any given round of the Six Nations Championship.

It is surely possible to drum up a half-decent test side from that little lot - a side capable of denying the All Blacks the quality possession they require to unleash their wonderful backs, to kick every goal that matters and to win the series three-zip. It should be so simple.

There again, England should have beaten Wales in Cardiff two months ago. The word "should" is the most deceptive in the language of sport.

Woodward has never been easy to second-guess on the selection front, but this much is certain: the "definites" are in a minority.

For every obvious choice - Brian O'Driscoll and Gavin Henson, Josh Lewsey and Stephen Jones, Gethin Jenkins and Paul O'Connell, Martin Corry and Lewis Moody - there are at least a couple in the either-or category.

And in some positions, most notably hooker and tight-head prop, Old Mother Hubbard appears to have done her worst. Name a world-class hooker to push Steve Thompson for the Test position.

Struggling? Thought as much.

Of course, Woodward would have been laughing all the way to Auckland had he been able to name Jonny Wilkinson, Mike Tindall, Will Greenwood, Richard Hill, Colin Charvis, Julian White and Phil Vickery without a care in the world, and had the likes of Lawrence Dallaglio, Neil Back, Mark Regan and Bryan Redpath still been playing international rugby.

But those in the first category are either injured or tip-toeing their way back into competitive activity after many months of incapacitation, while those in the second have spent all season away from the Test environment.

The biggest single conundrum confronting the head coach is what to do, if anything, with those who have done next to nothing since last September.

Amongst the injured, some are more wounded than others.

Tindall, the World Cup-winning centre from Bath, is precisely the kind of ultra-physical hard nut who would stand up to be counted in the inhospitable surroundings of Rotorua and Invercargill, but he has been wearing an orthopaedic boot for weeks and shows no immediate sign of returning to more traditional footwear.

Vickery, nursing a busted arm, has been advised to steer well clear of his beloved rucks and mauls for another three weeks at least.

Wilkinson (assuming he can be insured) and White are in better shape, but have played precious little rugby of late; Greenwood and Hill have performed for their Harlequins and Saracens second-string teams over the last 10 days or so, but are not remotely close to match fitness. And Charvis, he of the damaged foot? As ever, the Newcastle flanker is a mystery to all but his next of kin.

If he so chooses, Woodward could take a majority of these players to New Zealand in the hope that they will play their way into optimum condition over the first three weeks of the tour. But he will look seriously stupid if none of them are fit enough, or playing well enough, to face Otago in Dunedin on 18 June, the Saturday before the opening Test of the rubber.

Four years ago, Graham Henry gambled on a limping Dallaglio, only to see the No 8's fragile knee crumble during a tough match against New South Wales in Sydney. Henry is now in charge of the All Blacks, and will not be shy when it comes to giving selected tourists a thorough workout.

"Teams like Bay of Plenty and Taranaki may not be the very strongest in New Zealand, but they'll give the Lions a kicking," the former All Black captain, Sean Fitzpatrick, said a few weeks ago. And he should know.

Under the circumstances, it is ironic that Dallaglio, of all the players in these islands, should have muddied the waters and befuddled the thought processes for the second time in four years.

Woodward would have loved to have said, from the very outset, that his squad would be drawn entirely from current international personnel. But he could not say it, for the very good reason that the Wasps captain is, in terms of personality and experience as well as form at Premiership and Heineken Cup levels, among the towering figures in British and Irish rugby.

His captaincy of England in desperate circumstances last summer was nothing short of magnificent. Can he still dominate the Test stage? If he can, why not ask the same question of Back, another back-rower who has no truck with Anno Domini?

Dallaglio has probably crossed Woodward's mind as a potential captain, but this would surely be seen as an insult too far by those who sweated blood through the Six Nations, not to mention those Celts who demand recognition where recognition is due.

There were no dissenting voices when Martin Johnson was asked to lead the 1997 Lions in South Africa - well, would you have told him he wasn't up to it? - and there was a similarly profound silence when the great Leicester lock was reappointed, unprecedentedly, in 2001.

But there are no grounds on which any Englishman, not even Dallaglio or the increasingly impressive Corry, can be chosen ahead of O'Driscoll, or, come to that, Gareth Thomas of Wales, whose feel-good approach has had the Red Dragons eating out of his hand.

O'Driscoll is the clearest of favourites, not least because his will be the very first name on the Test teamsheet come 25 June in Christchurch. While his Ireland fell off a pedestal of their own construction towards the end of the Six Nations, it still took a blinding performance from the French and an emotion-soaked surge of Welsh spirit to deny them the title.

What is more, O'Driscoll's stock rose in adversity. He played poorly against France, yet scored the try of the tournament to keep the Tricolores honest. He lost his rag against Wales, yet summoned enough fury to inspire a late revival that had the Grand Slammers-in-waiting all of a fidget in the closing minutes.

Ireland's demise undermined the Lions credentials of several of their players - Ronan O'Gara, Peter Stringer, John Hayes, Simon Easterby, Johnny O'Connor - just as the Welsh triumph advanced the claims of Shane Williams, Tom Shanklin, Dwayne Peel, Brent Cockbain, Martyn Williams and Michael Owen.

This sextet could, and should, join the more obvious contenders, from Henson and Jones in the backs to Jenkins up front, on the Auckland-bound flight.

And the Scots? Um. With the exception of Simon Taylor, their magnificent No 8, they are at the mercy of Woodward's whim and the outcome of the nationalistic horse-trading that precedes every tour. They will be lucky to command half a dozen places.

Should Woodward select those who have yet to prove their fitness, much is likely to change before that first tete-a-tete with the All Blacks. Indeed, it will be flabbergasting if the party named on Monday makes it to the airport runway, let alone the start of the Test series.

There is a six-day training camp in May to negotiate, not to mention a tough warm-up match with Argentina at the Millennium Stadium on 23 May, two days before departure.

If a week is a long time in politics, a single scrummage is an age for the Whites and Vickerys of this world.

On the face of it, a state of flux is no bad thing - this time eight years ago, no one imagined that Tom Smith, Paul Wallace, Jeremy Davidson and Tim Rodber would play such pivotal roles in defeating the Springboks. But Woodward has far greater resources at his disposal than were granted to Ian McGeechan in 1997, and far fewer excuses available to him as a result.

The Lions are throwing much more money, considerably more people and infinitely more time and effort at this tour than at any of their previous forays across the Equator. If they lose the series in selection, there will be hell to pay, as well as the bills.

- INDEPENDENT