About 15 minutes from time in the recent Munster-Ireland World Cup warm-up match, the unmistakeable bald fella springs from the Irish replacements' bench and does his own warm up. His sprint along the touchline provokes a schizophrenic hum from the Cork crowd that can only be reserved for one Irishman. Keith Wood.

Nominally a Munsterman, tonight an Irish sub, they're both for him and against him - just plain excited. They know that whatever follows, it won't be dull. Wood doesn't disappoint. He charges into the fray and seeks to add more of an abrasive edge to a waning Irish second-string team.

But the die has long since been cast. His fellow Munstermen queue up for the tackles whenever he gets the ball and the final whistle comes as Alan Quinlan, Mick Galwey and a couple more of his Munster mates barrel him well over the touchline. Special treatment for Wood. The crowd loved that too.

Any animosity lasts all of a few seconds at most. Being Wood, he's then happily detained on the pitch for half an hour as he chats with kids. He returns to the team hotel, has a swim, snapilly vacates the post-match function and is home in Killaloe, outside Limerick, and in his bed by 12.45.

The following Saturday morning he sleeps in "beautifully", is late for his half-hour Saturday morning gym session at the NCTC, enjoys a light-hearted post-match inquisition with Munster mates Killian Keane and Paul Cunningham and then suggests lunch in Nancy Blakes. "The best pub in Ireland."

Walking through the nearby shopping mall must be like rubbing shoulders with a high profile actor or pop star. Even the uniformed security guards swivel their heads 360 degrees. People often hang out of him and not only ask for autographs but for permission to touch his famous dome for luck. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase `touch wood'. You wonder what it's like being Keith Wood.

So had he heard the loud murmurs when he warmed up the night before. "Yeah." Does he get it everywhere? "Yeah." So what's it all about. "Well, I don't know if all of that was pro me or not. I think it was a mixture. Yeah, I get that in most places. You get used to it. Actually, I enjoyed it. It's not a bad feeling to have. You get a bit excited you know."

As for his four fellow Munstermen unceremoniously piling into him over the touchline, he smiles faintly and observes: "I think there was a little bit of poetic licence there." But then again, he admits he'd do the same himself.

The glares more or less ceased when entering Nancy Blakes, where he bumps into Des Clohessy, brother of one of Wood's very best friends, and is served lunch by the girlfriend of another Munster player. The snug seems fittingly cocooned.

"I love Limerick, I always have. I thought I'd hate London but it's a comforting influence. It's a good place to be playing." For Wood, it seems, there's no getting away from his roots, even if the move to Harlequins was a very independent, very Woody thing to do.

This current year-long homecoming is, he stresses, only a sabbatical prior to the completion of the remaining two years on his contract. Happening purely by chance, it started last March when the Examiner sportswriter Charlie Mulqueen located Wood on a Harlequins train to Newcastle and inquired as to whether the rumour that Wood was returning to Garryowen as player-coach was true. Wood said no, explaining that he had two years left on his contract. Mulqueen wrote a small piece saying as much and that seemed to be that.

Somehow the Harlequins' chief executive got wind of the Examiner story, prompting him to approach Wood so as to verify the story. But it gave Harlequins an idea, seeing as they were losing Wood for a chunk of the season anyway. Wood mentioned this to Irish manager Donal Lenihan and IRFU president Billy Lavery on the Irish tour flight to Australia and it was ironed out when they returned in July.

"I'm back and I'm not back. I still go back to England and will continue to do so. But I have to spend more time here and I'm fortunate that myself and Claw (Peter Clohessy) have decided to use the same fitness programme."

Ah yes, the Claw. "Well, I always liked hanging out with Claw. We have very different ways and tastes but we get on very well. He is one of my favourite players to play with." Why? "Because he's hard, uncompromising and he has huge heart for the team he plays for. But the Claw playing for Ireland . . . . I like looking at him before matches. It means so much to him."

Clohessy, needless to say, returns the compliments, while adding that for all Wood's happy ways, "Fester takes his rugby very seriously. He pushes me in training, which helps me. He's very highly-motivated. He takes no short-cuts".

Half-jokingly, Clohessy adds: "I love playing against him too, 'cos I can torment him (verbally)." Interestingly though, Clohessy reckons that for other players, Wood might be irritating or annoying to play against, "to players who wouldn't know him".

Wood is uncompromising himself and is utterly unapologetic about it. What's more, he's been used as a stick to beat over the heads of some of the world's best hookers (Phil Kearns and James Dalton) by coaches such as Bob Dwyer and Nick Mallett, who described Wood as the best hooker in the world last year.

Wood is even attributed with ending Dalton's international career in Lansdowne Road last year, when knocking him for six and then dancing past him. Perhaps it's no surprise therefore that Dalton, when contacted in South Africa last week, "changed his mind" and decided "he wouldn't be doing that (discussing Wood)".

Privately, the Springboks cite Wood's high stiff-arm on Gary Teichmann in the first Test in Bloemfontein the summer before last as the reason for the bad blood in the "Battle of Pretoria" which followed.

That he was a marked man then is indisputable, as he generally is. "Without being over philosophical about it, it is what it is and there is nothing I can actually do about it."

Teichmann maintains that Wood is "one of the top hookers in the world. The way he gets around the park is extra and his first phase work is good. He's hard to play against and he's always in your face. That's the way the Irish play the game and a lot of hookers do that too.

Refering to that incident in Bloemfontein with Wood, Teichmann was equally diplomatic: "It wasn't just that incident during that game which created a bit of bad blood. But it wasn't a big issue. Both sides realised that that's now what the game is about after the second Test. I've played against him (Wood) since and we haven't had a problem."

IT goes with the high-profile territory. He can talk for Ireland as well as play for them and he's not always diplomatic about it. Already there's probably enough Wood cuttings to fill a forest. He fronted up RTE's coverage before, and BBC now. His image adorned Irish Permanent posters before, and Guinness' now. His image is everywhere, but it's not everything.

His team-mates describe him as "good-humoured," and this is the operative description and is also applied by Rob Henderson but, with the rider, "if a little aloof maybe to some people. His humour is pretty dry and pretty abstract. He lists Pulp Fiction as one of his favourite movies, so he's on that sort of wavelength".

If his body isn't hyperactive, then Wood's brain generally is. Aside from being an inveterate reader, he takes a broad collection of about 200 CDs with him wherever he goes. "He's passionate about everything, not just rugby, and especially about his beliefs. He's quite an unswayable character, to the extent of being stubborn," Henderson says with a chuckle.

Engaging company though he is, Wood doesn't suffer fools gladly and probably rarely loses an argument. Coaches have long since detected a stubborn streak. "I'm very stubborn," he admits, before reasoning why he's entitled to be.

"I think there should be an awful lot more personal coaching but it's having someone you would trust to give the comments. If you don't trust them you are never going to listen to what they say. "I do listen to criticism. I'm a big fan of talking to hookers. I like talking to Paul Cunningham. Paul would help me a lot with my throwing in. If you try and take in what everyone else says to you you'd be a fool. You wouldn't be a master of what you are doing at all. You have to be able to change and willing to listen to people, but it is (a case of) listening to the right people who have the right things to say."

For whatever reason though, his game has changed significantly. "I change my game all the time. It's in a constant state of flux. The way the game is progressing if you stand still at any stage people can react more quickly. You have to constantly change and change and change. But you can change and go back to things you've done before. That's change as well. You can go back to that again and again and again and then you just pick your time for certain things."

While his running game remains as dynamic, if more modified now, you'd scarcely credit that prior to the last World Cup - his throwing-in was once pigeonholed as more barn doors than bullseyes. He went out to South Africa four years ago as understudy to Terry Kingston and returned after surviving just five minutes of the pool game against Japan.

NOW, looking back, Wood admits: "I shouldn't have gone but I actually wasn't to know. I only knew afterwards. It hurt at the time (before the start of the World Cup) but I was 23, eager to do well, believing I was indestructible and all that stupid, macho, nonsensical, seriously post- adolescent testosteroneinduced hysteria. I thought I could probably do anything. I could, I could fall over on my shoulder - which is what I did do. It hurt, I thought it was okay, but it wasn't."

His exceptional line-out throwing and his organisation of the scrums, together with the rest of the close-in work, was rarely better than in the second Test in Perth last summer. However, his mood was not helped by being substituted over 20 minutes from time. Wood took great umbrage when a pitchside TV interviewer asked him whether he was a fullback, a winger, or a hooker. That old chestnut. It was meant as a compliment, but taken as an insult. "I'm a hooker," said the patently piqued hooker.

A turning point of sorts may have been last season's defeat to Scotland in Edinburgh. Wood took on an awful lot of ball that day but was so heavily marked it was to little effect and was as much an indictment of the team's failure to use him as a decoy.

Wood copped a good deal of flak. "Some of it was unfair," he maintains. "I was disappointed myself that maybe I hadn't read the signs. Maybe, after what I have just said about changing, I hadn't changed enough. England had negated me pretty well. I just didn't think that Scotland would do the same. It was an intrinsic part of the gameplan and I have to say I took the ball on a lot of the time, or some of the time, when I wouldn't have wanted the ball in the first place. But I got it. "Okay, you run the line, but that doesn't mean you should always get the ball every single time. Not passing the buck, I take a fair chunk of that blame but we needed to get to a stage where somebody would have taken some of that flak off me during the match. It just didn't happen and we were put on the back foot for a lot of that match."

It's helped that Ireland's game has evolved since, with the advent of David Humphreys and Brian O'Driscoll to the team, where before the backs were sometimes an optional extra. All in all, his is a lighter load nowadays. "He's a hugely different fella and a much happier fella now, like he was starting off," observes Philip Danaher, his onetime Garryowen team-mate and current Irish assistant coach. "Going through the captaincy in the Ashton era brought a huge amount of pressure on him and he was carrying the hopes of the team, which was a lot to ask of a kid who was only 24 or 25."

The load was heavier because Wood was not only Ashton's lieutenant but also the coach's mouthpiece to the players. Too much too soon then? "He was the only fella capable of doing it at the time," says Danaher. "That didn't make it right for him as an individual."

Perhaps he'll be Irish captain again one day, and indeed, he could yet emerge as a potential Lions captain for the 2001 tour to Australia.

For the moment, however, the World Cup dominates the horizon. "It's big 'cos it's big," says Wood matter-of-factly. "If you didn't do well at something you've been concentrating on for four years, you'd be doing yourself an injustice."

He seems far more contented and at ease now. He's been going steady for nine months. He approaches this World Cup in prime nick and in prime form. You'd like to think it's his time as well as his stage.