Peter Bills: From blood and sweat to fashion chic

You looked at him, turned away and then looked again. It was like doing a double take.

One of my most vivid impressions was of Keith Wood in Melbourne, battered and bruised, brushing away a tear of emotion on the night Ireland had gone out of the 2003 World Cup.

Ireland's great, charismatic captain was on his way home, his international career over. He looked weary, the flecks of blood wiped from his famous face.

But time moves on and so does Keith Wood. He stepped on to the specially constructed stage in the bowels of a London hotel's reception room this week, smartly dressed in a beautifully cut French jacket, white shirt and bright red handkerchief in his breast pocket.

Casual jeans and smart shoes completed the outfit. Wood looked good, very good. He was modelling some of the elegant range of the French-based Eden Park clothing company, of which the Irishman is a shareholder and very involved observer of one of Europe's fastest-growing companies.

Eden Park is run by former French international rugby centre Franck Mesnel, and Wood, together with Lawrence Dallaglio, Ieuan Evans and Kenny Logan, was in London to launch the company's status of official dressers of the Lions.

But that Irish humour was still intact, it was good to hear.

"Anything that can be done to make me look well dressed has to be a good thing. I have been battered all my life."

Wood revealed that he will be with the Lions in New Zealand in spirit only.

"I won't go to New Zealand, I seem to have been touring for ever, much as I have loved it. And once you have toured as a player it is hard to tour in another guise. I want to take a break from that scenario."

One of the major reasons is Wood's family, his wife and two young sons, aged 2 1/2 years and seven months. He will revel in a summer spent entirely with them.

But what are the thoughts of the 1997 and 2001 Lion on this year's tourists to New Zealand? How does he see the tour going?

Wood confronted that question in the way he played the game hard and full-on.

"The tests will be hard, aggressive and brutal. The mid-week matches will be attritional, much more so than in Australia.

"With New Zealand, you are touring a country where the sport is a national game. They know it and they feel it.

"Everybody in the street will tell you your arm is in the wrong place when you are binding or throwing into the lineout. Or why the scrum is being skewed. They all know it, almost intimately.

"It is a hard, intense place to tour. They don't have 50,000 hotels sitting waiting for everybody. It will be a series of small towns, and the cities are not huge, either.

"It is going to be very, very intense and difficult, and well-nigh impossible for the players to get away from it."

Wood's assessment of All Black rugby is equally without frills or adornments.

"They have underachieved for the last four or five years, probably longer. They have had the best players in the world and the best strength in depth. They have just got the mix wrong.

"Their [2003] World Cup team was sparkling and fantastic, but there was not a leader in sight. They fell down because they needed decision-makers on the field."

Have the All Blacks yet addressed that weakness in Woods' eyes?

"They're trying to, that much is clear, but they still have a bit to go in that direction. Tana [Umaga] is a good captain but they still need others like that.

"Go back to their 1987 World Cup team and remember all the leaders they had that were down the spine of that team.

"The truth is, they have never replaced that, not even in the early and mid-1990s when they had great players. They were still shy of a couple of guys to pull the crucial decision out of the hat when it mattered."

In Wood's view, Lions coach Sir Clive Woodward will not be picking from a background of outstanding technical quality for this Lions squad.

He says of the recently completed Six Nations championship: "Standard-wise, it was not fantastic. We saw some poor games in relation to technique, but we saw something that was unbelievably exciting which was probably better for the tournament as a whole, even though the standard was lower [Wales' renaissance].

"The excitement value in all those games was extraordinary. The tournament next year needs the standard to be higher but with the same level of doubt over who will be the victor at the end."

Wood could not mask his dismay at Ireland's ultimate failure in a season that had promised so much.

"I am disappointed with what Ireland did. It's hard to put yourself under pressure when you decide you want to go and win a Grand Slam. For that, you need a performance. If we had performed like we did in the autumn, we would have won the Grand Slam. But we didn't.

"Why? We have an aging team and we are low on quality in certain areas. And we started very badly in all our games and were under pressure at the scrums all the time. You can't really do anything under those circumstances."

* Peter Bills is a rugby writer for Independent News and Media in London.