BOOK OF THE WEEK; Making judgements on the drop game

Will Carling's England Dream Team by Will Carling (Sunburst, pounds 7.9 9)

Once upon a time (as the best stories always begin), every autobiography written by a famous sportsman would have as its final chapter "My dream team", in which they played the schoolboy game of assembling their best- ever side, either from their country, from the world, or throughout history.

And why not? It is, after all, always a lively topic of sports conversation, and the great thing about it is that you have absolutely no chance of reaching any positive conclusions - how do you decide between Len Hutton, Geoffrey Boycott or Michael Atherton as your first-choice England opening batsman?

Progress has changed all this, however, and what was once a bit of froth to send the reader away happy now costs the thick part of eight quid. This gets you a grand total of 80 pages - including an index, a rather fetching (if bafflingly banal) full-page picture of a clip-board holding a nearly blank piece of paper with the the words "Team Selection" scribbled in blue felt-tip on it, and one completely blank page.

After nine pages come the first actual words of the great leader on his dream team: "At some time or other YOU must have chosen your own England dream team. Well, now it's my turn!" Truly thought-provoking stuff. You have to get used to the exclamation mark, by the way - it appears more often than a Jeremy Guscott break does these days.

And so on to the selection process. "There are an awful lot of people not in the Will Carling dream team," we are told. Stone me, there's a surprise. He has 15 places to fill, several hundred names to choose from and he's going to leave someone out - it's tough being a selector.

Still, Carling does manage to produce a side, and an obviously formidable one it is too. If it has a tendency to the modern, that is largely because the years since 1988 have been the most successful in the country's history. Five of the 15 were in England's starting line-up against France for the opening Five Nations game this season - although, if the book had been written post-Paris, Mike Catt might not have remained as first-choice full-back. And of course, Dean Richards, who came on briefly at Parc des Princes, is in at No 8.

The heroic Richards is the least surprising of choices, but to give Carling credit he has not picked the most obvious team, and neither has he filled it with his mates. Rob Andrew, for example, loses out at stand-off to a hero of the 1960s, Richard Sharp. If the choice is interesting, the reasoning is startling for anyone who has watched England's approach for the last few years. "When you come to pick a back-line you think first of someone whose first instinct is to run," Carling writes. Which may be news to Stuart Barnes. Two others who may be left with a few questions are John Hall, the former Bath flanker who was constantly omitted by England under Carling, but is in here, and Wade Dooley, who loses out to a second row of Paul Ackford and Martin Johnson. That, at least, must have been a genuine dilemma.

This is not, then, something to buy for searing insights into the game, or as a wonderful read on the game of rugby. It is, though, what it should have been - a serviceable chapter.

Hugh Bateson