Woods gets a new lease of life

NIALL WOODS is the very personification of why the Irish Rugby Union Players Association had to be founded.

Still only 31, Woods has been unable to play the game he loves for the past two years because of injury. When the surgeon who operated on his cruciate ligament in 2001 told him that he would be limping for life within 12 months if he didn’t quit, he took the only course of action open to him. “Anyway, I knew I wasn’t the same player. The gaps I could get through the previous season weren’t there for me any longer; my knee wasn’t up to it,” he accepts.

Hanging up the boots hurt and hurt badly, he readily admits, but he is also glad to be able to continue life within the game which he played with distinction in the colours of Blackrock College, Leinster, London Irish, Harlequins and, of course, Ireland.