England’s Australian coach can lack sensitivity at times but from a media relations point of view he can make most of his counterparts nearly sound like speak-your-weight machinesWalking around the Twickenham concourse before final Saturday’s international was a familiar figure from another age. Now in his mid-eighties,Dudley Wood spent a decade as secretary of the Rugby Football Union before his retirement in 1996. His name is often associated with the final days of amateurism but, as any reporter in that era will confirm, and he was also among the wittier sports administrators ever to address a roomful of notebooks.
It was the urbane Wood who let slip that,when he was first shown around Twickenham, the RFU’s telephone number was ex-directory. precisely 30 years ago he also delivered one of the more fondly remembered of Anglo-Welsh rugby quotes. “The relationship between the Welsh and the English is based on trust and understanding. They don’t trust us and we don’t understand them.” Boom, or tish. They don’t tell ’em like that any more.
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Source: theguardian.com