Chris Hewett: Woodward understands the numbers game

Stage management has been a theme of this Lions visit since Thunderbird 2, the only aircraft large enough to transport the squad en bloc, touched down in Auckland last week, so it will be no great surprise if the tourists ask Quentin Tarantino to choreograph a fight scene starring Wayne Ormond and the rest of the Bay of Plenty pack in Rotorua this evening.

As they have their own chef, their own lawyer and their own spin doctor, the appointment of their own Hollywood director would seem a modest enough addition to the party.

Is Sir Clive Woodward remotely apologetic about the scale of this assault on the land of the silver fern? Is he hell.

He has been holding stage-managed gatherings to justify the stage management for the best part of a week, insisting that he is merely matching the level of detail brought to the table by his opponents.

"It's a change of mindset," he explained this week. "Some people don't like the word 'change' and don't understand it, but the way I see it, what we're doing here is plain common sense."

Nobody knows precisely how much money has been poured into this tour, least of all Woodward, who doesn't much care how the cash is found as long as it is there when he wishes to spend it.

The most popular budgetary estimate is in the 10 million ($26 million) region, which makes this a very expensive venture indeed.

If the Lions go belly-up in the test series, we can expect a question or two in the House of Commons.

Woodward, a driven character if ever there was one, may frustrate and annoy the purists with his new-fangled methodology, but in his world, results are everything.

If the Lions win ugly in Christchurch, Wellington and Auckland over the coming weeks - if they pinch the test series on the back of some dead-eye goalkicking, as they did in South Africa in 1997 despite being outscored by the Springboks to the tune of 10 tries to three - he will feel totally vindicated in his approach.

What is more, the Woodward blueprint for this tour will act as a template for future Lions treks.

The last time the head coach was here with the Lions, he was a player in the 1983 tour party. (Not that Ciaran Fitzgerald's overmatched team displayed much in the way of meaningful activity on that desperate trip.)

Woodward was a high-class centre capable of bamboozling the best defences with his unorthodox running angles; a maverick with a cutting edge.

When the Rugby Football Union, that ultra-conservative band of human cigars, suddenly got bold and gave him his head with England in 1997, there was a widespread assumption that he would be every bit as unconventional as a manager.

And so it proved. But Woodward was unconventional in a way nobody, least of all the RFU, anticipated, embracing the best new ideas in business and technology and applying them to a sport he considered to be lost in a fog of tradition.

He did not give a fig how he won, just so long as he did, and as a result, England ended up with a World Cup on their shelf.

He always believed the arithmetic of rugby union - that is to say, the sheer volume of numbers playing the game in England, allied to its commercial potential - would work in his favour, if only he could professionalise things to his own satisfaction. This he achieved.

Now, he is playing the same numbers game on behalf of the Lions, the numbers being unprecedented in terms of players, back-up staff and hard cash.

If it works for him, and the Lions reboard Thunderbird 2 with a series victory in their luggage, he will regard it as 10 million well spent.

Ask yourselves this: will you disagree with him?

* Chris Hewett is a rugby writer for the Independent in London