Have you ever heard such rubbish?Look at this season's Super 12

Have you ever heard such rubbish?"Look at this season's Super 12. I'll bet there are at least two teenagers playing for each New Zealand province, simply because they've made a conscious policy decision to fast-track the best of their youngsters. It was the same back home in Australia, where Tim Horan, Jason Little and John Eales all played state rugby in their first seasons as seniors. Hell, I saw Jason even before he played top-grade club rugby.

He may have been a colt, but that didn't stop him being the best outside centre in Australia. Pick him? Of course we picked him."The feedback from the meeting last month was very positive and I have no doubt that we'd get a working number of entrants for each new league. If we used the Australian model, the first and second teams would play one after another - the crowd gets more rugby for their money, the coaches get a chance to see more players - and I can guarantee England would see the system bear fruit within the first year."Talking of first years, Leicester could scarcely have hoped for a more immediate impact from their new coach. Beaten in the final of the Heineken Cup, the Tigers may yet end up with a big fat zero. All the same, Dwyer's willingness to sacrifice an entire herd of sacred cattle - Dean Richards, Rory Underwood, John Liley and John Wells have all been dropped at one stage or another - coupled with a determination to shake the club out of the rigor mortis of 10-man rugby, has made life unusually compelling for the Welford Road faithful."I'm still a fair way short of where I want to be with this side, but a few foundation stones have been put in place and now that we're organised a little better, I might be able to spend at least part of next season concentrating on some specifics.

To be quite honest with you, I've had no time at all to look at opposition teams. I wouldn't know most of the players we face each week if I tripped over them in the street and when people ask me what I think of so-and-so, I haven't got the foggiest idea who they're talking about. I'll be better informed next time around."But is it enough, this weekly grind through the Courage League mincing machine? After two bites of the Wallaby apple, does Dwyer truly come alive on anything other than the international stage? "I haven't missed the Test arena as much as I thought I might, but I wouldn't rule out another shot if someone loaded the gun for me. I love the challenge, wherever it might arise, so it wouldn't necessarily have to be Australia, either."Mmm, now that is interesting. Thanks to the telecommunications overload in his office, Dwyer answers a zillion phone calls a day at present.

Who is to say he will not lift the receiver one day and find Twickenham on the other end?. In his four years and 11 months as the high-profile occupant of the manager's office at St James' Park, Kevin Keegan remained a paradoxically closed book. Few of those who have played the management game have worn hearts so prominently on Puffa jacket sleeves as the man who famously vented his spleen on Alex Ferguson in the television interview room at Elland Road, and who stood on the steps at St James' explaining to restless natives his decision to sell his Cole scoring machine. Yet none of those outsiders who were physically the closest to Keegan the manager ever got close to the heart of Keegan the man. As Alan Oliver points out in his account of the Keegan years at St James' Park, the manager's office was strictly out of bounds to the journalists who follow the fortunes of Newcastle United. Oliver, the Newcastle Evening Chronicle's man on the Toon football beat for 17 years, did find himself in the inner sanctum on one occasion and the portrait of Bill Shankly is just a fleeting glimpse he is able to give of Keegan, the man behind closed doors. The book will remain closed in that respect until his autobiography rolls off the presses in the autumn; as the author admits when considering why Keegan flew the Magpies' nest, "only one man knows the real reasons - Kevin Keegan." Oliver's story of Keegan's management career nevertheless has its place on the football bookshelf. Indeed, many will be entertained by the tragi-comic tale of the strained working relationship that developed between the manager and the local newspaperman."There were occasions," Oliver writes, "when Keegan felt I had crossed him and he made my working life a misery.