Wilkinson the Twickers king but Wales boast a winner in Gatland

Warren Gatland, the new Wales coach, has never come away from HQ a loser either, having led Wasps to three Premiership Grand Finals and a glorious European Cup Final triumph.

Something will have to give.

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Having spent the last fortnight firing the occasional broadside designed to chip away at English belief, Gatland will shake the mighty stadium to its foundations if he can orchestrate a first Welsh victory for 20 years.

The savvy New Zealander is the latest in a long line of putative Welsh saviours and the first to be accorded such status for merely talking a good game before his team have had time to play one.

It is tribute to his influence that in next to no time he has changed the popular Welsh perception of Twickenham as a terrifying place to be avoided at all costs into one where everything is possible.

But England have good reason to view the presence of Gatland, Shaun Edwards and Rob Howley in Welsh tracksuits with some suspicion.

The last time the holy trinity appeared together at the stadium, Wasps pinched the European Cup from a superior Toulouse team, a high-class piece of pilfering completed by Howley's winning try in the north-west corner.

A fixture which would have been viewed as a mismatch at the end of the World Cup has suddenly become nothing of the kind.

Several factors since then have contributed to a contrasting shift in mood on opposite sides of the Severn Bridge and they extend beyond the galvanising effect of Gatland's reunion with Edwards, who has become every Welshman's new best English friend.

Quite by chance, a momentous occasion will be tinged with poignancy for him, falling as it does on the fourth anniversary of his younger brother Billy Joe's death in a road accident.

"I'm a big fan of Bill Shankly and I love to read his books," said Edwards. "He was a marvellous man but I think he probably had a bit of an off-day when he said football was more than life and death."

England are about to discover what life is like without two of the more heroic figures from the French trenches of last autumn in Martin Corry and the irreplaceable Jason Robinson.

How they could do with Corry to stiffen a back row always liable to suffer by comparison against their Welsh opposites even without the injuries that have eliminated Nick Easter and Joe Worsley.

Their loss would surely have left England no option but to change their minds about dispensing with Lawrence Dallaglio, a decision taken before he, too, called it a day.

Unless the English tight five punch their weight, figuratively speaking, of course, the Jonathan Thomas-Ryan Jones- Martyn Williams back row have the potential superiority to make Dallaglo all the more conspicuous by his absence.

Never will his country need Steve Borthwick to stand up more than now.

After a seven-year apprenticeship in the national squad, he has been around for long enough now to command an automatic Test place instead of watching others do his job, as happened for six of the seven weeks at the World Cup.

Phil Vickery, who has not gone the full distance, or anywhere near it, since Ireland gave England a fearful goingover at Croke Park a year ago, will blast away for no more than an hour before making way for the younger but equally powerful Matt Stevens, whose accession to the tighthead throne is, with due respect to the captain, only a matter of time.

The same ought to be said of the unfailing patient Lee Mears, still waiting for the durable 36-year-old hooker Mark Regan to give Father Time a break.

The danger for Wales may lie not in picking 13 Ospreys but in not being able to pick more.

Two of the Neath-Swansea region's best players, Justin Marshall and Marty Holah, are out of bounds along with a third All Black, Filo Tiatia.

Historically, the ploy of transplanting most of a club or regional team into the Test arena has never produced a win — not when Wales had 10 Cardiff players in the late Forties or nine from Neath in the early Nineties and certainly not when England squeezed seven Harlequins into the 1991 World Cup Final.

By the end, Gatland will probably have realised that some facts are sacred — like England always winning in the championship when you-know-who is there to kick the goals.