Sir Clive Woodward has long been adept at using the media to further his own cause and interests.

In the autumn of 2005, when I was editor of the Observer Sport Monthly, I was approached with a request to feature him in the magazine. We were offered an 'exclusive' with the former England rugby coach at his home.

The meeting was to promote Woodward's desire to become a top football manager. At that time, he was working as performance director at Southampton, where there was much unrest, but positioning himself, it was said, to take over from Harry Redknapp as and when he walked out, as everyone knew he would. It never came close to happening for Woodward and that episode turned out to be an embarrassment, though, in retrospect, one admires his chutzpah.

Silent about football, Woodward is, at least, speaking loudly about the critical condition of English rugby. After the shambolic World Cup campaign, the sad but inevitable resignation of Martin Johnson and the blundering of the bureaucrats at the Rugby Football Union, the English game is, as Woodward says, in a dangerous position.

Writing in the Sunday Times yesterday, he disparaged Rob Andrew, the head of elite rugby at Twickenham, when he said he did not have the necessary skills to appoint a new coach.

Woodward's intervention is well-timed and necessary. He has been silent for too long about the decline of English rugby and the chaos at the RFU. It is also self-interested. For all his maverick tendencies and eccentricities, Woodward is ruthless and would, no doubt, like a senior role at the RFU -perhaps as an elevated performance director, mentoring a coach as he embarks upon the journey of preparing England for the challenge of hosting and winning the 2015 World Cup.

Ever since he led England to World Cup triumph in 2003, Woodward has been in search of a role that is commensurate with his ambition. It was not enough for him to have won the World Cup: he wanted more. "Had I received the backing of the RFU after the World Cup when I was looking to create a rugby dynasty, I wouldn't have left," he has said. Note the use of the word "dynasty". This man had immense plans!

Woodward is presently performance director at the British Olympics Association. He remains driven and obsessive - characteristics for which he is easily mocked. Yet it was his drive, rigour and far-seeing application of sports science that galvanised English rugby in a way comparable to what Andy Flower has since done for English cricket. There is nothing inherently wrong about English sport or English sportsmen and women, as Woodward and Flower have shown at different times. What is often absent is a masterplan for change and a coaching team determined and gifted enough to bring on the revolution and effect a lasting transformation.

One of the reasons our administrators often resort to appointing foreign coaches is because they do not trust the qualities and intelligence of those found at home. Johnson was a great player and captain but a limited coach who got the top job far too soon. "They put Martin in - not only had he not coached international rugby before, he'd never coached anyone before," Woodward correctly points out.

Brian Ashton had just taken England to the World Cup Final in France in 2007 but was ousted. Martyn Thomas, autocratic chief executive of the RFU, wanted Johnson as coach but abandoned him during the campaign in New Zealand when it transpired that the cult of the Big Man's personality was not enough. His players claimed to respect and wished to honour Johnson, yet they betrayed him when it mattered most.

Johnson was culpable, too, and showed too much loyalty to Jonny Wilkinson and to his coaching team throughout his tenure. Neither was near good enough. And so, as Woodward says, England returned home a "laughing stock around the world".

The laughter and derision will continue until a new chief executive and distinguished coach are appointed and the RFU demonstrate they are a fit and proper institution rather than an old boys' club of incompetents and can create a system and development programme that begins to reverse such alarming decline.

Roebuck was no genius but his struggles would make a brilliant book

The suicide of the former Somerset captain and journalist Peter Roebuck, who jumped from a Cape Town hotel window to his death after being accused of sexually assaulting a young man, continues to fascinate the cricket world.

Many fine tributes have been written about Roebuck, who I didn't know but with whom I corresponded on several occasions when I was once trying to get him to write for me.

What emerges from the tributes and obituaries is that Roebuck, a tormented soul, was a mystery ultimately even to himself. Perhaps it was the inner drama of conflict and self-loathing that gave his writing its depth and psychological acuity.

Roebuck was no genius, despite the inflated claims made on his behalf by columnists such as the Times's Simon Barnes. Shakespeare was a genius. Of contemporary writers you could argue that the American novelist Cormac McCarthy is close to genius.

Roebuck merely wrote well about and around cricket, and in a voice and style entirely his own: jaunty, urgent and provocative. I always looked out for his stuff whenever I was in Australia and suspect there's a brilliant long piece, even a short book, to be written about him and his melancholy struggles.

Jason Cowley is editor of the New Statesman