"What's he going to say?" I've often described that as the daftest question ever put to me on live national radio.

My answer was something to the effect that if I knew the answer, or if any of the 200 or so rugby correspondents, feature writers, television crew and radio reporters knew the answer, we would not, in all probability, have got up at the crack of dawn for a media briefing that was in any case going to be broadcast live on both television and radio.

And as was revealed on Desert Island Discs last week, the man himself had no idea what he was going to say.

England's World Cup-winning coach Sir Clive Woodward had already announced that he was resigning from the RFU, and why.

We'd all gone to Twickenham to for the formal winding-up of the relationship.

But then Sir Clive departed from the script that he and his wife, Jane, had prepared.

Instead of thanking his former employers for all their support and encouragement, Sir Clive attacked the RFU for their reluctance to embrace his vision for the future.

If he hadn't been so incendiary he would have stood a better chance of being appointed director of elite rugby a few months later.

The job that had seemed tailor-made for Sir Clive went instead to Rob Andrew and, apart from a disastrous spell as Lions head coach in 2005, one of the sharpest minds in the sport has been in the rugby wilderness ever since.

What if he'd stuck to the script? Would England have plummeted so far so fast down the world rankings? Would they have plummeted at all?

Would they have hired and fired first Andy Robinson then Brian Ashton, as well as World Cup-winning lieutenants Phil Larder and Dave Alred?

Would they have turned quite so desperately to Martin Johnson?

The chances are they wouldn't, but the beauty of sport is that things don't always go according to logic, or to plan.

Woodward acknowledged as much when, in the same Desert Island Discs interview, he described how surprised he'd been when Jonny Wilkinson dropped the goal that won England the World Cup.

Woodward wasn't surprised at the fact of it – he could see and appreciate how the players were putting into practice a training-ground routine labelled Zig-Zag – but he was surprised at the timing.

He felt that England's forwards should have carried the ball a couple more times to work their way so close to the opposition posts that Wilkinson – who had after all missed three drop-goal attempts already – couldn't fail.

And, of course, he wasn't surprised at the outcome.

He had created an environment in which there were no excuses and plenty of trust.

He'd paid such attention to detail and his methods of selection and preparation were so successful that the former was removed and the latter could flourish.

He trusted his players to make the right call and to know the precise moment to put it into practice.

He would have dismissed anything but T-cup (thinking clearly under pressure) as excuses. The interview also highlighted the way Woodward was, at times, quite happy to crank up the pressure on his own team.

The night before England played Ireland for a winner-takes-all Grand Slam decider in 2003, Woodward deliberately stressed that, even they had plenty of big games behind them and plenty of big games to come, this was their one shot, their one opportunity at glory.

He knew that the World Cup was six months away but he didn't want to give his players the opportunity of coming off the pitch in Ireland claiming, consciously or subconsciously, that any part of their brains were focussed on the global tournament to come. The difference between then and now is huge.

Okay, Woodward had better players at his disposal but he would never have allowed any of them to come off the field, as captain Steve Borthwick did in Rome last weekend, and describe a leaden-footed and narrow win over the Six Nations' whipping-boys, as "fantastic".

He would never have allowed them to claim, as so many in an England track-suit tried to do, that Italy were a tough team to beat, and that, in that context, a hard-fought away win was a good result.

Woodward would have dismissed such comments as self-serving excuses, and so would Martin Johnson the player. Martin Johnson the manager seems to be made of different stuff. More's the pity.