For somebody who, according to Sir Clive Woodward, should not be able to live with himself, Rob Andrew is looking quite comfortable in his own skin. The bewilderment of the former England coach that someone such as Andrew should ever even have considered going from the club game at Newcastle to the England set-up seems not to be shared by the man himself. Who, incidentally, beat Sir C to the job as director of elite rugby at Twickenham.

'What can I say?' says Andrew, careful not to be drawn into a tit-for-tat spat with rugby's ex, now the director of elite performance at the British Olympic Association. 'When I was director of rugby at Newcastle I had the interests of Newcastle to protect and promote. That was my job. I was employed to make my club as successful as possible.

'But I always placed the England cause above everything. Newcastle players like Jonny Wilkinson, Jamie Noon and Mathew Tait were always available. I wanted them to represent their country. To be honest, I don't know what Clive means. If I had no interest in England why would I have joined Club England as far back as 1998? And I was involved enough to write the Andrew Report on the state of the game in 1999.'

He pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. It is a trait of his when concentrating. We are sitting in his Twickenham office on the other side of Rugby Road from the stadium. It's nothing grand. Just an office, really. But it's a whole lot better than the office that did not exist for Woodward when he turned up for his first day of work as England coach. The Rugby Football Union rather expected him to work from home, and furniture had to be hastily rearranged.

Andrew really doesn't want to play this game. He prefers to muse on broader matters. 'When I was at Newcastle I used to think I had a pretty sound idea of what I was trying to achieve. But ever since I've been here - what, three months? - I've been asking myself, "What is English rugby?"

'It's not an easy one to answer. And not just because the English system is the most complicated in the world. I still think the game in England exists in order to provide players for the England team. But there are a lot of people out there who have invested a lot of money in the club game and who see their activity as an end in itself.

'The club game is now a £120million industry. Ten years ago that did not exist. If you want to change things now you have to deal with people who are running a very tight business, juggling the money they make for themselves through the gate, what they put in as benefactors and the funds that still come from the RFU.'

The money provided by the governing body has, so far, prevented rugby from going down the football route. The national cause is still important to the clubs because they are part-funded by the proceeds of the international game. But the relations between Premiership clubs and the RFU have been frosty for years now.

'I know it sounds daft for me to say we are not like football. After all, I went to Newcastle to make the rugby club part of Sir John Hall's football empire. Newcastle United was our model. But club rugby, I believe, still has this ethos of providing players for the national team. Or just making rugby players. At Newcastle we were the first, along with Leicester in 2001, to be granted a licence to run our academy.'

The 11 years he spent at Newcastle have given Andrew influence among the clubs. How was it, for example, that, having reacted bitterly to the scheduling of the extra autumn international against the All Blacks, the clubs made their players available for the fourth Test of the series, the second against South Africa, when they had a verbal agreement that no player would be asked to play in all four?

'I asked the question,' admits Andrew. But that, surely, was a breakthrough moment, a question posed, followed by an act of generosity by the very clubs who had threatened to drag the whole question of availability once again through the courts. 'I merely asked the clubs the question,' repeats Andrew.

So, what is wrong then? What is it about England that makes their elite rugby management so complex and dysfunctional at the moment?

Andrew is reluctant to criticise the standard of play in the Premiership. But in his former job with Newcastle, as the years passed, he became increasingly conscious of spending less and less time on skills training. The day-to-day grind of merely patching up a team to take the field on a Saturday became all-consuming.

'There is a problem now with overseas players,' he says. 'Players like Michael Lynagh and Philippe Sella came to England when the game first went pro, with a lot to offer. Nowadays there are too many players who can't get a contract elsewhere, who come to England and just take the money.'

Many of those players are signed, however, because they are at least available for the whole season. Unlike England players, who can disappear from their clubs for weeks at a time. And who can then come back ruined by injury.

'Let me give you an example of how bad things are,' says Andrew. 'The Long Form Agreement, covering the availability of players for England, runs all the way through to 2009. In it, the RFU pay for the elite players to come together for England training on Mondays and Tuesdays. Well, I went to those days at Loughborough in the autumn. And what are players, who have just played on the weekend, good for on a Monday and Tuesday? Absolutely nothing. It's a complete waste of money.

'So, we have to renegotiate for block bookings, whole weeks of training before internationals. But even to get an extra Wednesday is going to bring you up against directors of rugby who lost their England players for four weeks in September and October and another four in November. I know exactly how hard that makes life.

'That Long Form Agreement has years to run. But it's already way out of date. You can't unilaterally tear it up. But other countries have much better programmes up and running. We have been overtaken.'

Not even at the academies, often presented as a beacon of hope for the future, is everything going swimmingly well. 'We are pretty reasonable at spotting the best raw talent up to the age of 18. After that it's a bit more hit and miss. Some academies, like Gloucester's, are outstanding, but not everywhere is as good as that.

'We had a bit of a shock the other day when we discovered that, across the age ranges at the National Academy - that's from 16 up to about 21 - 23 per cent of the players had not had a single game by the end of November. We wonder why we have a low skill base, but there are too many youngsters who simply aren't playing. In some places the ratio of gym work to rugby on the field is four or five to one. That's ridiculous.'

Too little rugby at the academies, too much rugby at the clubs. Andrew can take his time sorting out the former and must tread cautiously with the latter. Softly, softly must he go.

But with Team England he must act with urgency. And a lump hammer. The ongoing decline of the national team must be arrested.

At academy level, young coaches such as Mark Mapletoft and Ben Ryan have been promoted, fast-tracked into the cause of improving attacking skills. But these appointments are nothing compared with the sackings that have revealed the claws on the Andrew hand and prompted Woodward to re-engage venomously with his old sport.

Barely three months into the job, Andrew has already sacked head coach Andy Robinson and fitness coach Dave Reddin. The first was easy to see coming. Eight defeats in nine games and a pattern of disintegration as each game unfolded - one Test against South Africa excluded - spoke for themselves.

'I thought the line in the sand would have been drawn last April at the end of the Six Nations. But it appears it has still not been drawn. The overall impression was of things getting worse, not better.'

Reddin's departure was more surprising and prompted Woodward to declare it the 'last straw'. At last Tuesday's monthly briefing, RFU chief executive Francis Baron explained it away as part of a cost-cutting exercise.

But I suspect there is more to it than that. Reddin was part of the 2003 gang and I think Andrew may be heartily sick of the mere mention of that year. Even Woodward is going off the moment that made him, declaring it possibly the worst thing that ever happened to English rugby, if only because it has stood ever since like a giant obstacle to progress and change. England won the World Cup with the system. Why change?

Andrew toes the line about cost- cutting and Reddin, but one line he uses later in a more general context may be revealing: 'I swear, from now on, anybody that looks back is out.'

OK, he'll permit himself one last glance towards the past. 'We have this historical trend in England, to produce a good team in the early years of a decade. The early 1970s, Bill Beaumont's grand-slam side of 1980, the team I played with in the 1990s. And now the 2000s.

'What we have to do is to fill in the gaps. Keep the good team going. The players must be at the centre of their industry. We must not let the England team operate in isolation, cut it off from the rest of the game. If you do that you create a Them over there, and if you have to introduce a new player, he gets dropped into Them from a great height. And he normally ends up a right mess after the experience.

'We must ease players into the group. Make them comfortable in the environment first. Assess them at the academies, play them with the Saxons [England A], sit them on the bench, give them a taster. It's a massive step up to international rugby. We have to give our players every chance to survive up there for a long time.'

On Wednesday Andrew presents his list of recommendations for the job of coach to the RFU's management board. Will he go for the management figure, the Dean Richards who will work with the existing coaches of Brian Ashton, Mike Ford and John Wells? Or will he go for a new head coach, an overseas option, possibly, who will come in with a brand new group of his own people?

The less complicated solution is the overseer of what is already there. There would be fewer people, for a start, to sack. But it would appear that Rob Andrew is rather at home in complicated situations. He will studiously be pushing his glasses back on his nose, but the hand that readjusts his vision is a talon.

Sweet - and tough

Well presented, well spoken, well educated - there is something, well, almost beyond belief about Rob Andrew. He played rugby with unselfi sh self-eff acement, sacrifi cing a much more daring game, cultivated at Cambridge University and, briefl y, at Toulouse, for the workmanlike styles of Wasps, perennial champions or thereabouts of England, and England themselves, near champions of the world, with Andrew at the helm in 1991. He was cool and he was brave. He set all sorts of scoring records and set new standards as a tackling outside-half long before defence became compulsory in the professional game. He played cricket almost as well as he played rugby. He was a modern, thoroughly sporting hero, a true Golden Balls.

The only person who could possibly surpass his achievements was Jonny Wilkinson. It was, of course, Andrew who mentored his own successor at Newcastle, pioneers in a far-fl ung corner. Andrew was, quite naturally, highly successful as a coach and in management. And it was all done with modesty, a shy smile and a genuine delight when the golden moments came: thelast-minute drop goal against Australia in the 1995 World Cup, the yelp on the radio when he witnessed Wilkinson win the World Cup, 12 years after his own England team had failed narrowly to do just that.

But there is so much more to Golden Balls. Or so many other parts, made of harder metal. Andrew, throughout his playing days, was engaged in a quite furious duel for the England No 10 shirt with Stuart Barnes. The smooth pragmatist against the chubby adventurer. Andrew won the contest, a hard-nosed competitor from start to fi nish. And yet able to surprise, even astonish. On the eve of the 1991 World Cup fi nal, it was Andrew, along with Will Carling, who decided that Australia could be beaten with a passing game, far removed from the pulverising forward play at which England excelled at that time.

The strategic about-turn surprised nobody more than the England forwards, many of whom think to this day that some psychological short-circuit took place. It was a rare misjudgment by Andrew. England passed themselves nowhere. Andrew's kicking game, on a day when his forwards were more dominant than ever, would surely have been enough. It was heroic, if unsuccessful, in its own way. Andrew was a romantic, after all.

But he was also ruthlessly calculating. At the first signof panic at Twickenham at the dawn of the professional age - in 1995 the Rugby Football Union tried to declare a moratorium while they adapted to the new order - it was Andrew who led the sanction-busting by heading to Newcastle, then under the ownership of Sir John Hall. Andrew's Newcastle purchased well, paid well and played well to become champions of England. Their style was not romantic but bruising and uncompromising, with Va'aiga Tuigamala the talisman. In the paid age there was no room for fl ights of fancy.

And yet there was. It was Andrew, in the year before he left Newcastle to join the RFU as director of elite rugby, who packed his 22-man squad with Engl and-qualifi ed players. This was missionary work. What was good for Newcastle was going to be good for England, too.

It was the only time he did it. Matt Burke of Australia generally made the team, but in the days of over-reliance on overseas players he felt it was a point worth making. And now he's back down south - having uprooted his wife Sara and their three teenage daughters just two weeks before the start of term- at the heart of the rugby establishment. He will look the part and will come over as a sweetie. We should not be fooled . This is scorpion sherbet with a sharp sting, just what they need.