Personal battles loom large for Wood

The ultimate team game can get very personal. When Bath and Wasps meet on the banks of the River Avon this afternoon in a sulphuric Premiership contest, diluted only by the passion-killing presence of the end-of-season play-offs, there will be an overpowering whiff of individual rivalry in the air. For Ali-Frazier-Foreman read Borthwick, Grewcock and Shaw; for McEnroe-Connors read Barkley and King. And if you want something a little more Shakespearean - a tale of usurpation and exile as well as confrontation - try Martyn Wood and Robert Howley for size.

Andy Robinson, the England forwards coach whose contribution to the World Cup victory in Australia was not nearly so widely appreciated as it should have been, will return to his holy of holies, the Recreation Ground, to weigh up the immediate international claims of Steve Borthwick, Danny Grewcock and Simon Shaw, all of whom have an eye on the second-row vacancy created by Martin Johnson's retirement ahead of the Six Nations' Championship. Robinson will also pay close attention to the performances of Olly Barkley and Alex King at outside-half, in light of the injuries affecting Jonny Wilkinson and Charlie Hodgson.

Had Sir Clive Woodward shown just a little boldness in selecting his 43-man training squad for the Six Nations, his second-in-command would also have found himself watching Wood, who might reasonably have expected an invitation to this week's red-rose gathering in Surrey. The fact that the 26-year-old Yorkshireman heard nothing - that the silence surrounding his name was positively deafening - does not bode well for the future. Fortunately for his sanity, today's game gives him licence to forget about looking ahead while he deals with his past.

Wood is officially England's fourth-choice scrum-half, and nobody likes being fourth. Fourth is probably the worst position on the planet. In Wood's case, it leaves him one place off the half-back podium while lumbering him with the occasional long-haul flight to nowhere. Four months ago, when England suffered an outbreak of scrum-half-itis in the week of their important World Cup pool game with the Springboks, he was asked to travel from London to Perth at the drop of a hat, just in case the three men ahead of him - Matthew Dawson, Kyran Bracken and Andy Gomarsall - failed to recover from their various twangs and twinges. Wood made the trip, all 13,000 miles of it, only to find that the sick had risen from their beds and that he was not required to travel the last 400 metres to the team hotel.

By that time, he had already made his mark at Bath with a series of characteristically fiery and aggressive performances at the heels of a big, bully-boy pack. That fire and aggression had previously been deployed on behalf of Wasps, for whom he made his league debut in the title-winning season of 1996-97. He played the best part of 100 Premiership games for the Londoners, but as he entered his prime, a certain Mr Howley entered the dressing room. A former Wales captain under Graham Henry, veteran of two Lions tours and intermittently acknowledged as being the best scrum-half in the world, his arrival from Cardiff knocked Wood's world off its axis. Wasps played 34 front-line fixtures last term; Howley started 24 of them.

"It got to the stage," Wood said this week, "where I knew I wasn't playing enough rugby of the right quality. There was also a contractual issue at Wasps, but I didn't leave because of the money. It wasn't like that at all. I needed fresh opportunities, and plenty of them. Simple as that. Bath expressed an interest in me, and I quickly reached the conclusion that this was an attractive option. They were building a new side under a new head coach, and they wanted me to be a part of what was going on. I couldn't have asked for much more, given the situation I was in at the time."

One of Wood's principal motives in heading west down the M4 was the prospect of a reacquaintance with Barkley, with whom he had played representative rugby in the past. The respect is mutual. The scrum-half considers his partner to be among the most gifted footballing backs in the Premiership, while Barkley describes Wood's pass to be the quickest and most sympathetic he has encountered - no minor detail when you shoulder the responsibilities of the outside-half role and are the No 1 target for those head-hunting barbarians who inhabit opposition back rows.

If Wood's service really is that special - and the Recreation Ground aficionados are not arguing the point - the reasons are fairly straightforward. During his home-town days with the Harrogate club, he was taught by both Nigel Melville and Richard Hill, which is the equivalent of an ambitious young poet being shown the ropes by Yeats and Eliot. Melville possessed the purest, fastest and most accurate pass of any British scrum-half of the past 50 years; Hill was practising and preparing like a full-time professional more than a decade before the end of the amateur era.

Melville, in particular, has been a significant figure in Wood's development. "I was very friendly with Paul Sampson" - the thrice-capped England wing - "when Paul was at Otley and I was playing for Harrogate," he recalled. "Paul was being coached by Nigel, and he fixed up some coaching days for me while he was at it. We all ended up at Wasps, and Nigel was my guide until he moved to Gloucester a couple of years ago.

"But to be honest with you, I've never considered my pass to be the strong point of my game, maybe because it's such a basic tool of the trade that I don't see it in terms of strength and weakness. If I have a main attribute, I would say it is my ability to talk to forwards in a way that gets a response from them." Would that be 100 per cent Anglo-Saxon, in the grand tradition of John Lydon, or something a touch more lyrical? "It's pretty basic, I have to admit. If I learned anything from Rob Howley during our time together at Wasps, it is that the average forward responds positively to a well-delivered bollocking."

In other words, Wood relishes the heat of battle as much as, if not more than, any scrum-half around. It is reasonable to suggest that his reputation at Wasps was not rooted entirely in the tenets of pacifism, and when he was sent off for stamping during Bath's victory over Leicester at Welford Road at the end of November, there were muttered remarks from the West Country cognoscenti about leopards and spots.

"I don't see myself as aggressive - at least, no more aggressive than a scrum-half has to be in this day and age," he said. "I do get frustrated, certainly. It's my job to get the ball away from the breakdown, and when the opposition are messing us around in that area there is always the temptation to do something about it. And yes, sometimes that temptation gets the better of me. It's increasingly rare, though. Since coming to Bath, I think I've played with more self-control rather than less."

That self-control now extends to his thoughts on international rugby - or, in Wood's case, the lack of international rugby. He was England's third-choice scrum-half in the 1999 World Cup, but finished the tournament every bit as uncapped as he began it.

Four years on, his similarly undecorated World Cup adventure earned him the nickname "air miles". Having spent his adolescence dreaming of glory days at Twickenham or Murrayfield or Carisbrook, brief appearances for his country in Vancouver and San Francisco do not add up to much.

"England? It's not something that I lose sleep over nowadays," he said. "There was a period when it got to me, when I'd spend far too much time wondering how some other scrum-half was performing or what Clive was thinking. If you go too far down that road, you're lost.

"I'm playing rugby this weekend for a team who are at the top of the Premiership and want to stay there. If good things happen off the back of that, wonderful. If they don't, I'll still be playing for Bath next week.

"It's my job, and I'm looking after it. Any other approach would be self-defeating."