For all the foreign players, all the money, all the charmingly appointed Dubai villas, you'd never really accuse English football of being cosmopolitan. In fact, the national game is a gene pool so restricted it makes Christmas at Balmoral look like Sunday lunch round Mia Farrow's. This isn't, obviously, to suggest everyone's related in a literal sense - but if you're looking for a tribe that ... what's the euphemism? ... "doesn't like outsiders", the footballing community is it.

So we can hardly be surprised by the somewhat sniffy reaction to Clive Woodward's decision to quit rugby with a view to taking up football coaching. But to hear the chuntering from some quarters, you'd think Sir Clive had suggested opening a Third World sweatshop staffed by seal pups.

You'd think, in fact, that he had demanded the FA gift him the England manager's job with immediate effect, as a thank-you for his services to the nation. The reality is obviously rather different, and if the great elders of the game honestly care that much about his application for a grade two coaching position, well, perhaps they should have a lie down until this embarrassing attack passes.

Yet as surely as you knew Sven-Goran Eriksson would react to Woodward's intention to have a crack with a phlegmatic "Why not?", so you knew the news would tempt a host of "experts" to call the talkshows - probably from the comfort of their sheepskin-upholstered Jags - to pour scorn on the very impudence of it.

There has, of course, been some serious technical speculation on whether Sir Clive could make the leap to even a vaguely comparable level in football, but the most strident voices have been those of the sort of Luddite experts who were virulently opposed to a Swede being given the England manager's job. I'd always hoped that those chaps would move on to another important philosophical point - maybe lobbying for a rule stating that all horses competing at the Olympics must have been born in the country their riders represent - but it seems Sir Clive has caught their piggy eyes. Their idiotic reaction suggests either they're genuinely too stupid to understand that whatever his fantasy ambitions, no one will throw the concept of meritocracy out of the window, or they are simply refusing to see the bleeding obvious.

Namely, that most of the maverick new blood pumped into football of late has by and large been A Good Thing - if only because it stops that comfortable slump into stasis the English are so good at. There is much in the disbelief voiced at Woodward's extraordinary decision that reminds one of the reaction to news that some Russian billionaire had bought Chelsea.

Whatever one thinks of Roman Abramovich, his arrival shook up the Premiership in a fascinating, hitherto unthinkable way. Consider too our latest maverick, Jose Mourinho, whose first press conference at Chelsea was a hilarious refusal to play ball in the time-worn pageant of banter with journalists. "No," he sneered at the third cretinous request that he state as fact he would win the Champions League. "I am not going to say what you want to hear for the last page of your newspapers." Now you don't get that from Dave Bassett. Sadly, Sky didn't pan back to show the faces of the hacks, but I'd like to think at least one or two were mouthing guppy-like in shock.

The arrival of Eriksson is another example. Even those disappointed by his side's performance in major tournaments can't deny his appointment infused the game with a kind of mystery or hope or unpredictability. Typically, Eriksson joked of Woodward's plans that he himself "could give rugby a try". Now that I'd like to see. Not as much as Harry Redknapp coaching the England cricket team, admittedly, but the thought of the inscrutable Swede being inveigled into one of those weirdo beer-based rituals after a success has a certain quirky charm.

I'm not actually suggesting that Freddy Shepherd take weekly drinks in the Long Room at Lord's (though you could argue the two parties deserve each other's company). But most sports could do with being rather less pompously isolationist, a little more open-minded, and if it takes a maverick like Woodward to point this out, we should be grateful. Arise, Sir Clive, and cross-pollinate.