Gerry Thornley  hears a contentedly-retired Keith Wood pledge allegiance to his province even against old club Harlequins

He's as hyper-busy as ever with, as he puts it, lorryloads of stuff. His PR company Touch Wood fills his diary and there won't be enough days in his week with the upcoming Six Nations and BBC commitments. Recently he resisted "an entertaining offer" from an unlikely source to take up a lucrative six-month contract. "Do you see that doorway over there?" he said to the person making the offer. "I don't think I'd be able to run that far."

He doesn't have the time to miss playing, even if he had the inclination, and he doesn't miss the pain. He and Nicola also have Alexander (2) and Gordon (six months) to take care of and after spending three weeks in Killaloe, have recently moved house in Richmond. He's still young at 33, is getting back into his golf, his body is holding up well, he hasn't put on weight but he misses being fit, and plans to rectify that.

"I've had my time. Somebody asked me if I had mixed emotions when Ireland won the Triple Crown. No. I was delighted. That was all ever I bloody wanted. And now I can sit back in reflected glory and enjoy it without being kicked around the place. I got a huge kick out of it. I got a great buzz out of everything that was happening, and I knew it was my time to stop. My God did I know it."

Sure there were wins that got away, as well as those that didn't, but how could he have many regrets? Wood had a rich, fulfilling career, and he pretty much milked every last drop out of it. Not for him slinking off into the sunset wondering if he could have gone on a little longer.

He'll go along today to Twickenham with an extra spring in his step. It's his province against his club, but given the circumstances, no split loyalties.

"I want Munster to win the Heineken Cup, I really do," he stresses, adding that he's not sure how many more chances this Munster team will have before some rebuilding is required. "This could be the last roll of the dice for some of this team. "

"I'd like to see some younger players brought into the squad. My only disappointment about watching the Irish team get to the final of the Under-21 World Cup was that none of the players were playing with any of the provinces. I'm ashamed to say I didn't actually know any of the players."

Wood goes along with the general view that Munster haven't scaled the heights of previous pool campaigns in the competition. "It's not a bad thing, because if they get over this weekend and win, they'll be in the position where they'd be if they were winning every game by 50 points without having extended themselves to that extent. They don't need to be world champions in January. And if it happens that they really peak in April and win the European Cup, then perfect. That's what they want to do, win it."

It's pretty obvious that Munster aren't scoring tries like in previous campaigns, though Wood believes Christian Cullen is too easy a target. "Christian Cullen has received some undue flak in my opinion," claims Wood. "He's not getting the service he needs or is required to make the full use of his ability."

He cites Cullen's opportunist try against the Ospreys last weekend. "Anthony Foley chipped ahead, just to get ahead. He didn't see it being a try, but Christian Cullen saw it being a try from 10 yards further back. To dive full-length, keep control of the ball and slide in for the score under that much pressure was a brilliant try. And by a guy who's playing at the top of his game."

Not that Wood doesn't heap praise on Foley, a consummate footballer, Killaloe neighbour and long-time friend.

"He's playing unbelievably well. He's in the right place at the right time all the time with, like, scary premonition. He's playing such fine football I think he'll have to go on the Lions, to be honest."

People forget that Wood played for Harlequins for all but one season of his professional career. They still hold a special place in his heart. However, after a brief upturn in fortunes, another run of five successive defeats has left them propping up both Pool Four and the Zurich Premiership. Wood believes they were deluded by their strong showing last year in a World Cup season, and didn't strengthen sufficiently.

Amid all this Wood maintains their Irish colony is doing quite well. "Jeremy (Staunton) had to get rid of the demons from his Munster days when, every time he stepped on the pitch it might have been a month since the last time he stepped on to a pitch, and he felt he had to conquer the world anew every month. And that's very hard on a young fella, a young fella who is blessed with an awful lot of talent."

Wood admits Staunton needs to push on now and that it will be interesting to see if his game can grow over the last five months of the season. He maintains that Staunton's best position is outhalf, albeit "an outhalf who needs a level of direction. He needs someone strong outside him."

Significantly, Harlequins will have more to play for today than in any of their pool games to date. "Quins are going to put an awful lot into it because of the big crowd. It's a big reference game for them. There's a great possibility of getting additional support, and Quins are proud, and they have taken a kicking this season."

Wood attributes the closeness of the first game to the conditions and he believes Munster will win. "I think it could be a fair old fight for a while but I see Munster stretching away in the second half. It could be very hard for an hour but by the same token if Munster rattle out a couple of quick scores, it may not be hard at all."

Of all the successes or wins that eluded Irish teams the most regrettable was surely the European Cup final defeat of 2000 when Wood, Peter Clohessy and Mick Galwey and a cracking good Munster team were beaten 9-8 by Northampton, prompting Wood to quip that he hated Twickenham.

"We were good enough to win it and should have won it. We made a lot of mistakes on the day and some mistakes in our preparation, and unfortunately it virtually came down to a kick of the ball. If Ronan's kick had gone over . . . but it didn't. I remember it was the most appalling kicking conditions. You couldn't see it, but the ground was very slippy and the grass was long. It was very odd. That's the fickle nature of sport. We could have been heroes.

"For some reason we didn't fly to Heathrow. We flew to Gatwick, even though the game was in Twickenham, and we drove to the ground the day before the game and got caught in Friday traffic, and got caught on the way back. We spent the day in bloody traffic on a bus."

It seemed particularly cruel that Munster brilliantly overcame a very good Toulouse side in blistering heat in Bordeaux in the semi-finals 31-25, only to be mugged in January-like downpours and gales later that May.

Wood reckons Munster also panicked a little when faced by Northampton's grinding, forward-orientated game after a run which took them past Saracens, "who played a flashy brand of rugby" and a French cast list of Colomiers, Stade Français and Toulouse. They would try things, Munster would defend, tackle like demons and force them to cough up the ball.

"Northampton played a smothering type of rugby and we hadn't played anything like that all season, and I think it knocked us. We'd got used to playing teams who weren't battling for anything on the ground. And here you had Northampton, whose sole purpose was to fight for every single ball. We lost a lot of turnovers. They didn't try anything, they didn't make any mistakes. (Paul) Grayson is a past master at kicking the ball where he wanted it to go. They did nothing with the ball and we didn't know how to deal with it."

There were bigger disappointments, but these were superseded by the high points. A Lions Test series win in South Africa, the Brian O'Driscoll masterclass in Paris and, he says, both watching and being a part of the Irish team's growth ever since.

"Therewere any amount of them. Like, from a club perspective that Northampton loss was one of the worst and best feelings I've had in rugby. The worst because it was just so terrible losing a final, and then 30 seconds after we lost the Munster crowd started singing. It was incredible, that level of empathy or whatever, was beyond sport. That was pretty special."

"Losing was bad, but that's the hard part of sport. If you want the easy life then you bow out in the pool stages."

Not the Wood way, and not the Munster way.