Hat trick hero does Dad proud

'We really had to take the passion out of it,' said Greenwood Jnr. 'We couldn't afford not to because if it had been close, that crowd would have been hard to beat.

'I know that because I know what it's like to be on the receiving end of it and I'd been reminded of that at lunchtime on Saturday.'

The first time the bottle-blond Harlequin had been in Cardiff for a Wales-England match, in April 1985, turned out to be his father's last as national coach.

'I went with my uncle Ian and we sat up in the gods of the old North Stand,' he recalled. 'It was very loud and very scary for a lad of 12 who happened to be English. Wales winning always seemed to be a done deal.'

England found another coach, not that Greenwood Snr ever received formal notification of the change.

'I never resigned, nobody sacked me but then nobody rang me up either,' he said. 'I just faded out of view. But this was a magnificent vindication, a wonderful way to put the Greenwood family record straight.'

The controlled fury of the Welsh start, demanding the video referee's immediate intervention, merely heightened the anxiety of an already agitated ex- coach until Jonny Wilkinson's 20-20 vision sent the taller of his centres stampeding on an inside run round behind the posts. Up in Row 22, his father began to go 'absolutely ballistic'.

What he was doing off the pitch, England kept doing on it, shredding Wales at Will with the precision of their passes and the bewitching footwork of their backs. It was a show orchestrated to dazzling effect by Wilkinson, a fly half who also rarely misses a kick at goal.

With Austin Healey in his element as Dan Luger's early substitute, making it happen as only he can, England could have scored 10 tries and would certainly have had seven had Greenwood's pass gone to hand instead of touch with a two-man overlap. He was at pains yesterday to deny rumours that the pass had really been intended for his father.

England had won in Cardiff before, invariably through the sledgehammer of their pack, but never like this. Wilkinson's sublime control and Mike Catt's handiwork ensured that Wales were put to the sword in a way which reduced the match to a no-contest after half an hour.

The funereal atmosphere enveloping the Millennium Stadium descended to such a level that at one point the few Wales fans not rendered speechless offered some half-hearted barracking at Wilkinson electing to kick for goal until they realised that it would only cost three points instead of seven, and thought better of it.

England went about their business with a ruthless quality which the All Blacks, at their zenith under Sean Fitzpatrick in the mid-Nineties, could not have surpassed. They were that good.

Against a stable of thoroughbreds, Wales, with a few notable exceptions headed by Rob Howley, had too many selling platers and too few specialists behind the scrum; no natural wings, no full back.

There is no substitute for the real thing, as Healey and every other English substitute showed. Wales, their pre-match expectations overblown by a blind refusal to face the realities, reached half-time so badly deflated that their sole objective for the rest of the match was to stop the English riot running to 50.

They managed it due to some last-ditch tackles, like Allan Bateman's on Greenwood, and some extravagant finishing, like Iain Balshaw's in-goal knock-on after a breathtaking chase.

Having celebrated on 'water, water and more water', Greenwood drove back to his London flat yesterday for a spot of carpet-fitting to follow the carpet-bagging, before returning to Wales in the summer.

'The Abergele Golf Week,' he said. 'I'm looking forward to it already.'