Austin Healey strolls into the cafe at Sainsbury’s at Oadby in Leicestershire on Friday morning. It is a bright day, and although he retired from rugby union two years ago and has worked for a Swiss bank since then, there is a sense of him never having left. He still commentates on rugby for the BBC and Sky, and he is, after all, Austin Healey. He may check out, but he never leaves.

He ambles through recent events in his life: the arrival of delightful twins means that he and his wife, Louise, now have four girls; the madness that tempted him to return to amateur rugby last month; and his two games for Bishop’s Stortford, and how his shoulder went again. Once a player, always a player.

“It was an eye-opener,” he says. “The standard was poor, but when there was a bit of a scuffle, the whole team was looking after the guy who was originally involved. Afterwards they all went to the bar and tried to buy their opposite number a drink. That’s what it should still be about. We’ve gone too far with all this science in rugby, the warm-downs and the recovery, all that needs to be a component of the game. Instead, it is becoming everything about the game.”

Healey won 51 caps for England, but injury and his admirable versatility stopped him from getting far more. When it ended, nobody was sure whether his best position was nine, 10 or on the wing. At Leicester, where he won two European Cups and was a key member of the team that dominated English rugby from 1998 to 2002, people understood how good he was. Those who filled Welford Road every second Saturday in winter were his greatest admirers.

One of them is sitting across from him in the cafe, occasionally smiling because he can hear Austin without really listening. When the man gets up to leave, he comes to Healey’s table. “Just wondering,” he says, “are you going to be working with England, alongside Johnno?” Healey looks up and quietly says: “No, I won’t be.” The man winces, as if a dart of pain has torpedoed through his body, and walks away. It was a brief moment’s regret, but it said a lot. So Healey won’t be linking up with his old mate Martin Johnson, then? “We’ve had chats about it,” says Healey. “The day after I did my shoulder playing for Bishop’s Stortford, we played a charity football match together. His little Molly was playing with our Ellie Mae and Daisy, and they came round.

“I said, ‘Molly, will you have some dinner?’ and she said, ‘Yeah, yeah’. I said, ‘Johnno, do you want some dinner?’ He said he wasn’t sure. I said, ‘Okay, I’ll tell you what, I’ll make you dinner if you give me a job’. And there was this moment of deadly silence. My wife, Lou, gave me this look. Johnno sat there, not knowing what to say. ‘I’m only joking, you dick . . . no, seriously, you can have the crackling if you give me the backs job’. There was actually a moment of silence, a real uncomfortable silence, and at that point I knew I wasn’t getting the job.”

PERHAPS the first thing you should know about Austin Healey is that he reads the Bible to his Ellie Mae and Daisy before they go to sleep. “It’s a children’s Bible, very good book, great stories; a beginning, a middle, an end and a moral in each one.” If the girls have follow-up questions, they get straight, witty and sometimes acidic answers because that’s just Healey.

He called the story of his life Me And My Mouth. In choosing that title for his autobiography, he didn’t understate the case. A small army of coaches couldn’t deal with Healey’s sharp mind and even sharper tongue. At different times Bob Dwyer, Graham Henry and Pat Howard would probably have paid good money to have had him taken off their hands. The difficulty stemmed from Healey’s poor opinion of them. He didn’t think Dwyer and Henry great coaches and didn’t think much of Howard as a bloke. How could he take against such a seemingly affable soul?

“I thought Pat was a brilliant coach, very good. We had a personal falling-out which was about respect. When he first came to Leicester, he went up to my wife and said, ‘Why are you married to him?’ Lou said, basically, ‘Whatever’, and I went over to him and said, ‘If you ever speak to one of my family like that, I will knock you out’. That was it. We never got on after that. I can’t have anyone who shows that kind of disrespect without reason. I could never forgive him for that. We got on with it, we played together, he was a good player.

“As a coach, he made promises to people that he didn’t keep. One incident in particular, which I shouldn’t talk about, but I will. One of our players had an eight-game clause in his contract which meant he had to play eight games before his wages got reinstated to their previous level. Pat thought he had played just seven games and said to him, ‘I just want you to know I know about the eight-game clause and to tell you I won’t be playing you again this season’. The guy said, ‘Don’t worry, mate, I’ve already played eight’. The other players found out about that and went mad. Something had happened between this player and Pat, but you can’t do that to a player and retain the respect of the other players.”

The thing about Oz, as they called Healey, was that he would never just sit there. Of course, he had his moments with Sir Clive Woodward. He tells a story about the time around 2001 when Woodward sold his business. A meeting was called and the England coach explained to the players that after the disappointment of the 1999 World Cup and the Grand Slam defeat to Scotland in 2000, he had done some soul-searching and been in communication with a sports psychologist in Ireland. As a result, he had decided to sell his business.

From the Irish psychologist, Woodward heard that his relationship with the players wouldn’t be what it should be as long as he had his business and the players were investing everything in their rugby. At the meeting Woodward announced that for this reason, the business was gone. “We are now all in the same boat,” he said. Most of the players were impressed. Healey was not so sure.

“I asked Clive how much he sold the business for. I think he said £6m but it was definitely several million. ‘So that puts us all in the same boat, then’, I said. I don’t think it went down that well. The guys had great respect for him and as a result a lot of the stories never came out. He was a left-field thinker and I liked him for that, but that was one of the reasons we clashed so many times. Clive could be brilliant and could be infuriating, and he hated any sort of conflict. He would phone people at five o’clock in the morning to tell them they weren’t in the team: ‘Sorry to have missed you, but we’ve decided to go with the same team that played last weekend’.

“At selection time, some guys would keep their phones on through the night and when it rang at five in the morning, they’d say, ‘Hi, Clive’, and he’d say, ‘Oh, I didn’t think I’d get you’, and they’d say, ‘Why did you call, then?’ That’s one of the differences between him and Johnno. Johnno will always phone you up, tell you straight and that’s one of the reasons why he’ll be a big success.”

When Healey was unluckily left out of the squad for the 2003 World Cup, it was Johnson who called him first. “You’re not going,” he said. Healey thanked his teammate and when the call came from Woodward, he was better prepared. “I think Clive expected me to have a Gazza moment and threaten to have him shot. I just said, ‘Do you honestly believe that if you’re behind with 20 minutes to go, Andy Gomarsall is going to be a better bet than me off the bench? Which of us do you think can turn the game?’ He just said it was a collective decision. ‘Well, anyway’, I said, ‘good luck and you know where I am’.”

At the time, not going to the World Cup destroyed him, but time has passed and he sees that experience in a different light. “I suffered a shocking knee injury on April 13 in that World Cup year and I know what I achieved in terms of my rehab. I can tell you it was a bigger achievement than winning a World Cup. While doing six weeks’ rehab in America, there was one technique where I put a drainpipe over my eyes while doing a 40-minute aerobic session on a Versa Climber. The drainpipe was there to block out everything except the pictures I imagined at the end of the tunnel. I saw my dad’s face as I walked into the bar at Twickenham after an England match. From the other side of the room, he would give me a discreet thumbs-up. I saw Lou’s face at home. Six months pregnant with Daisy, she was doing everything with Ellie Mae.

“These were such powerful images that during that 40-minute session, my heart rate didn’t drop below 190, which was ridiculous. I fell off the machine at the end and Bill Knowles, the guy supervising my rehab, said he couldn’t believe what I had just done, that it was frightening. Emotionally, that was more of an achievement for me than anything I did on the pitch, and while I had those images in my head, I never felt one bit of pain.”

That came later and it tells about the other side of Austin Healey.

At primary school in Birkenhead, he was small and cheeky and often picked on by bigger boys. They gave him a few beatings and the fear of more beatings terrified him. He spent a long time running away. Then, on the final day at primary school, he was hit by a much bigger boy called Marvin. That day he hit back, saw the expression on Marvin’s face turn to fear, and when he hit him again, Marvin cried.

“I would like to say I felt sorry for the lad, but I didn’t. I actually found it liberating and liked the fact that I had stood up for myself. The fear I had once felt disappeared that day.”

He had always been competitive. Without fear, he became aggressive; it was part of what made him such a good rugby player. He was also quick-witted, and when insults were traded, he could be merciless with his teammates. Banter, it was called, but often it went to the core of a man’s vulnerability and Healey rarely lost.

There was a moment on the 2001 Lions tour to Australia when Graham Henry, with all the players gathered round, asked Healey if he was ready for the game. When Healey said he was, Henry replied, ‘About f****** time’. There was a momentary silence before Healey spoke again. ‘Who do you think you’re talking to, you idiot?’ It was a pretty vicious response. They looked at each other, but Henry did nothing.

Mostly the verbal fencing was brutal but friendly, hurtful and playful at the same time. Always Healey had the answer. Then the World Cup happened. One night, at a charity function, guests were invited to pay £10 to have their photo with the trophy and Will Greenwood stood up and said he would donate a tenner to Oz, so that he, too, could have his photo with the cup. He has always liked Greenwood, they once shared a house together and remain good mates but, my God, that hurt Healey.

“I don’t have that medal and that’s the worst part. In five or 10 years’ time Mark Regan will say something to me and I will put him down straightaway. But when I put him in a hole now, Ronnie can look up at me and ask, ‘Have you got one of these?’ That is actually much worse than not having the medal.

“I was seven years in the England squad, gave people shit on a daily basis. Good shit, bad shit, generally it hit the mark. I always had the upper hand. In terms of banter, nobody could compete with me. Maybe one or two, but not properly: [Phil] Vickery would come back with something, slow but relatively sharp; Lawrence [Dallaglio] would just get aggressive, but I gave them all crap for seven years. Then they won the World Cup and I wasn’t there and I could never have the upper hand again. One line from them would kill me.”

HE is now a businessman and father. The recent arrival of twins has brought the Healey flock of girls to four and he worries about England, the country, and where it is going. He thinks often about his future and feels that for the past two years he has been circling a giant roundabout, unsure which exit to take. Rugby and business are the conflicting choices, but it’s not that simple. There is television work and the temptation of celebrity.

There have been plenty of offers from reality television programmes, but he has wickedly said he is not like other recently retired England scrum-halves (Matt Dawson and Kyran Bracken) who feel a deep need to be famous. But he’s human. There’s now the possibility of a chance on Strictly Come Dancing, and though he is unsure, he was astonished by Ellie Mae’s response when he mentioned to her that it could happen.

“She’s only six and she thought it would be the best thing in the world for her dad to be on that show. ‘Can I vote for you?’ she asked.” But as a young married man with kids, he worries. “I have always been very English, but it frightens me what’s happening in this country. Food prices, fuel prices, what’s going on in our educational system, our health care. And I’m thinking you could probably have a better lifestyle and standard of living elsewhere. You talk to Johnno’s brother Will, who’s in Italy, and when you see how much he loves it there, you think about it.

“We’ve moved too much into the technological age; our kids watch TV, go on the internet and stay inside their houses. We’ve got a big garden, swings, a trampoline, all sorts of things, and unless I tell them, the girls never go out there.

“It’s funny, there’s a parallel here with rugby. We need to step back a little from the fixation with science in our rugby and rediscover the core values. The same with society: we need to leave our TVs and internet and get outdoors again. Part of me is keen to take my family elsewhere.” Australia, perhaps? “Mongolia would be more likely than Australia. Maybe it’s one of those dreams that stays with you all your life and is destined to remain unfulfilled.”

And what of Oz? Will he remain unfulfilled? “Lou and I had a long discussion yesterday about all this and I have to make some decisions about my future. I don’t miss playing rugby, definitely don’t miss the training, but I do miss the competition. I have an addictive nature and I got hooked on winning. Since giving up rugby, I’ve been addicted to online poker, where I would sacrifice time with the kids to beat this guy at a poker table. When eventually I closed all my sites down, I was down about £15,000. Now it’s spread betting and I’ve been doing better at that. It’s like I have to have a stake in the result.”

But he’s done his time betting on the internet and wants to move on.

Business or rugby? He still isn’t sure, but his decision will be made by the quality of the offers. He is involved in a couple of business ventures that excite him and offer enough of an intellectual challenge. What they don’t offer is the mano-a-mano competition that thrilled him through a 10-year career at Leicester.

“I’ve got a couple of mentors, businessmen I bounce things off. They say I should get back into rugby, but, for me, the challenge has to be right. There are opportunities and maybe something will happen. But I don’t want to be a backs coach. I’ve already been that for the last five years of my time at Leicester. Now I want to be the boss.

“If you write that, people will think I’m an arrogant so-and-so – why should I be a head coach straight off? But you have to challenge yourself and I’ve always been like that. It’s not arrogance, but a belief that I could do a reasonable job.” Alas, perhaps, it will not yet be with England. For whom should Johnson go? “I don’t know and I think Johnno doesn’t yet know. I don’t think it will be someone like Will [Greenwood] or [Mike] Catty or me, because the person should have experience of running a team. It’s a huge appointment for Johnno, effectively the head coach. We’re talking about guys in the mould of Jim Mallinder, who says he’s staying at Northampton, Steve Meehan, who’s at Bath. Philippe Saint-Andre wouldn’t be bad, but he’s French.

“There is talk of the Australian guy who worked with Wales, Scott Johnson. People say Shaun Edwards would have been perfect. I don’t know if he’d have been perfect for this job because I’m not sure he yet has a full tactical understanding of rugby union. He’s somebody you definitely want in your coaching team, and what he has done with Wales has been frightening.”

Healey is sure Johnson will be successful. “The hardest thing for a coach to gain is respect from his players. That can take a long time and in some cases it never happens. Johnno starts with that respect. It’s like an 800m race and he’s already one lap ahead of everyone else. And you look at the players he’s got. He needs a second-row to emerge and some of the back-row guys to develop, but the talent behind the scrum, that’s just unbelievable.”

Is Harry Ellis the best of the scrum-halves? “He can be, but he’s not at the moment. He needs to refine his pass and develop his decision-making. He can’t be putting his personal wellbeing at risk in the first five minutes of a game. He is so brave, he’s crazy. I’d never have put my head where he puts it all the time, but he needs to be sensible too. If he makes the improvements, well, he’s got everything.”

Danny Cipriani? “He’s got the attributes to become a massive global star. The main difference between him and Dan Carter is that Carter’s better at running straight when he takes the ball. Danny likes to go sideways, but that will develop over time. You look at the wings, at the potential of someone like Ben Foden, who is, by a mile, the best full-back in England despite the fact that he wants to play scrum-half.”

To whom will Johnson turn to captain the team? “I think it will be Mike Tindall. Johnno knows him. Phil Vickery is in the wrong position and is too quiet on the pitch. Johnno has to have a strong relationship with the captain and he could have that with Tindall.”

There is no rugby question on which he does not have a strong opinion and few people out there have more belief in Martin Johnson. The future for English rugby, Healey says, is bright, and after his two-year break from active service, you sense he is ready for a return. By July, and the start of preseason training all over England, there will be a group of players sharpening their wits and fastening their seatbelts.

The wisdom of Oz

- In 1999, when Lawrence Dallaglio was stripped of the England captaincy, bookmakers were offering odds of 350-1 for Austin Healey to take over. According to coach Clive Woodward, the wing approached him and said, ‘I’ve got £20,000. If you want to match it, we’re out of here’

- Healey squared up to Australian lock Justin Harrison, left, during a Lions midweek game in 2001. Harrison was then drafted into the Wallabies team for the deciding Test against the Lions. Healey greeted his international call-up by describing Harrison as ‘a plod, a plank and an ape’. Healey, who was later fined for his comments, was ruled out of the Test through injury but Harrison played a key role, stealing a crucial lineout in the last minutes in Australia’s victory. The Leicester man was publicly rebuked by coach Graham Henry

- Four years later, Healey, not playing this time, wrote another newspaper column about the Lions tour to New Zealand in which he attacked England coach Andy Robinson, with whom he had fallen out: ‘Have you heard the latest from the Lions camp? Clive’s sending Andy Robinson to a fancy dress party tonight. He’s going as a pumpkin, they’re hoping when it gets to midnight he’ll turn into a real coach!’ A few months later, Robinson asked Healey to leave a postmatch party for England players

-Also in 2005, Healey was called up by the Mirror and asked if he had any message for Gavin Henson, who had been fined and suspended after elbowing Healey’s Leicester teammate Alejandro Moreno in a Heineken Cup game. His reply was: ‘Next time Henson plays against us, we’ll have him.’ He was reprimanded by Leicester