Sleepless Knight with Few Automatic Selections, Picking a Squad of 44 to Head to New Zealand Will Have Been Far From Straightforward for Clive Woodward, Says Alasdair Reid

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SO now it's his turn. We've all had our own hours of fun, but tomorrow it falls to the man who actually matters to reveal his Lions squad. A little after midday, at a packed press conference near Heathrow Airport's Terminal Four, Sir Clive Woodward will draw a line under all the speculation of the past few months by announcing the names of the 44 players he will take to New Zealand this summer.

Thus endeth the phoney war; thus beginneth the conflict for real. Sir Clive will be faced by a familiar battery of notebooks, microphones and television cameras tomorrow, but his most critical audience will be 12,000 miles away, ready to dissect the strategies behind his selections and to cook up the means to counter them.

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Sleepless Knight with Few Automatic Selections, Picking a Squad of 44 to Head to New Zealand Will Have Been Far From Straightforward for Clive Woodward, Says Alasdair Reid

You almost yearn for those quaint old campaigns of the past, when a Lions tour only really began when 15 blokes in red shirts trotted out from a ramshackle pavilion in some godforsaken corner of the colonies to face the Outer Boondocks Counties first XV.

There was an element of surprise about the endeavour then, marvellously described as a cross between a pr...

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