Johnson bows out at the top

Why dare do anything to smudge the sublime image of that moment in Sydney on November 22 when a brooding former bank clerk from Market Harborough, in the heart of England, stood astride the rugby world like a colossus.

This, remember, was the boy whose innate will to win was such that, at the age of nine, he was 'incensed', as his father David recalls, when his Ridgeway primary school decided to use a rota system rather than pick on merit for a local soccer cup semi-final. 'Dad, that means we're going to lose,' he complained.

Sporting history is littered with examples of those who succumbed to the temptation of one more game only for someone else to let them know afterwards that they had reached their sell-by date.

Nobody is more deserving of going out on his terms than Johnson. Never once has he been afflicted by an ounce of vanity or any selfish need for self-promotion.

He has never suffered fools gladly and has always given a sharp, oldfashioned dig in the ribs to the question of his rising fame.

'You can't afford to go round thinking you're the greatest,' he would say. 'Once you think like that, someone's going to knock you on your backside sharpish.'

Nor has he ever been one to use 10 words when one or two will do, or to embroider the heroic. Wellington, on a wet and windy Saturday night last June, was a case in point.

England, reduced to six forwards by two sin-binnings, held the eight-man All Black shove for a series of scrums in front of their own posts. When I asked him what was going through his head at that time, he did not bat an eyelid.

'My spine,' he said, to hoots of laughter. An essentially private man, he has never been one for revealing more than a smidgen of his private persona. Confronted periodically with the inevitable questionnaire for tour purposes, he would pull a face at the one asking him: 'How do you spend your spare time?'

Johnson's stock answer was: 'Filling in forms asking me how I spend my spare time ...'

Intriguingly, the budding schoolboy centre half became captain of his country by accident. Had his predecessor Lawrence Dallaglio not been embroiled in a drugs scandal, Johnson might never have been anything more than a relief captain for lesser matches.

Instead he chiselled out a record in his granite image, his unique ability to combine rugby on the edge of the laws with an almost simplistic winning formula gave him a percentage success second to none, 34 wins from 39 England Tests, 87.17 per cent.

He also successfully bridged the huge gap between the amateur and professional eras.

An All Black apprenticeship gave him a flying start in the art of survival amid the hidden traps of the line-out. Clive Woodward probably always suspected that his first big decision post-World Cup would be to appoint a new captain.

Logically, it should come from one of the two official vice-captains Jonny Wilkinson and Phil Vickery. There are arguments against both, but the former shoulders more than enough responsibility as it is and the latter is prone to lengthy spells of injury.

Dallaglio is arguably the best choice, although Woodward's refusal to put him in charge against Uruguay in Brisbane, when Johnson took his only breather of the World Cup, suggests otherwise.

The Wasps No.8 meets the two major criteria, of being sure of his place and having a proven track record of captaincy.

Of the other contenders, among them Matt Dawson and Neil Back, only Richard Hill would be an automatic choice for Six Nations.

Johnson, the American Football fanatic, devotee of The Simpsons and all-round quiz trivia king, is a best-selling author these days as well as a family man with an infant daughter, Molly.

Whoever takes over, the one certainty is that there will never be another captain like him.