It is too late now but the Rugby Football Union really should have seen the speeding juggernaut heading their way. As a player Sir Clive Woodward's trademark was his elusive running and - whoosh! - he has duly left his employers clutching at thin air just like the Scottish defence of yesteryear. Slashing breaks have remained part of his repertoire.
Seven years in the same job, in fact, is above average for England's World Cup-winning mastermind. At no stage in his career has he hung around indefinitely, his grasshopper mind always demanding fresh pastures, from Henley via London Irish to Bath and England. Even when he "emigrated" to Australia in the 1980s he was back inside five years.
In short, people are wrong to assume Woodward has undergone some kind of Reginald Perrin-style mid-life crisis. There will be no pile of abandoned tracksuit, underpants and trainers on the halfway line at Twickenham this morning, although the joke might appeal to Woodward's sense of humour. He knows precisely what he is doing or, perhaps more pertinently, what he does not want to do any more.
Ever since the most triumphant day of his life in Sydney last November he has clearly been looking for something to replicate that rush. Climbing Everest twice might appeal to some people but that would mean revisiting old ground and that has never been Woodward's style. Onwards and upwards is his preferred course and football, to a patriot with such limitless self-belief, would be a fitting destination in many ways - unless, like many a modern-day Icarus before him, he strays too close to the Sun.
The rugby world will certainly be a duller place without him. To rise at 7am on a Sunday morning in Edinburgh this year and eavesdrop on Woody railing against the feng shui and pipe bands of Murrayfield was a surreal delight; neither will the security guards at Twickenham know themselves without his pre-dawn arrivals for work.
Nor will the England players, few of whom ever really knew what Woodward was liable to say or do next. One minute they found themselves on opposite sides of the barricades, notably during the squad's strike action in 2000, the next he had his arm around their shoulders, telling them they were the greatest. Naturally they believed him; Sir Clive is a persuasive guy.
His unpredictability, though, long ago became a strength, to the point where he could contradict himself several times within the same sentence. This, perhaps, explains why his soccer ambitions have not received more of a public airing before now. Almost two years ago his wife Jayne confided that her Clive felt he could do for English football what he had done with English rugby. When pushed himself, he laughed it off as someone else's fantasy. Clever, very clever.
Who else but Woodward, furthermore, would agree to co-operate with a biographer who had loudly called for him to be sacked after the 1999 Rugby World Cup? Or check the entire team into the smartest hotel in Cape Town on his own credit card as he did on the ill-fated England tour in 1998? Never has there been a coach in any field who has acted so impulsively on gut instinct.
And yet it worked. The first on-field signs that a revolution had begun came in December 1997, barely three months after Woodward had been forced to set up his laptop in the reception desk of the RFU's offices because no one had thought to allocate him an office. England drew 26-26 with a startled New Zealand at Twickenham and, although they lost 76-0 to Australia in Brisbane the following summer, rugby politics rather than Woodward's coaching was to blame.
There was even a foretaste of this week's developments after the 1999 World Cup when, depressed by England's quarter-final exit to South Africa, he talked darkly about "skiing uphill" and considered "throwing my toys out of the pram". In those days, though, his ambitions for English rugby were still unfulfilled and subsequent disappointments, notably grand slam failures at Murrayfield and Lansdowne Road in 2000 and 2001 respectively, simply made him and his team more determined.
By last year England were winning with equal facility at home and abroad, steamrollering Ireland in Dublin to complete a Six Nations grand slam and registering historic wins in Wellington and Melbourne. Then, as if we need reminding, came the World Cup. England did not always play to their potential but they delivered under the fiercest pressure, just as Woodward had taught them to do.
Since that epic night few have bothered asking what would have happened had Jonny Wilkinson's injury-time winning drop-goal swerved away, Beckham-like, towards the corner flag. We shall never know for sure but, had England lost, the pressure on Woodward would surely have reached screaming pitch by now. Five defeats in their last six Tests, retirements or not, is not the platform of strength his successor would like.
In five or 10 years' time, however, such minor details will be long forgotten. "Judge me on the World Cup," he once said. So we will. Players sometimes moan that coaches get too much credit. In Woodward's case, who can honestly say England would have won the Webb Ellis Trophy without him?
