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Books and your enjoyment thereof are strictly subjective and your opinion of them changes as time passes and others emerge, to either cement or destroy the reputation of your previous favourites. Here is my current all-time top 20 rugby books.

1. Winning! By Sir Clive Woodward

You may laugh at the idea of Sir Clive being top of the book charts. But before you do, read this outstanding account of the way that the driven, talented, off-the-wall genius put together England's world champion team, tapping a thousand sources and experiences. Then compare it to the way other Test teams were run and are being run in other nations, and in England. And weep.

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2. The art of coarse rugby By Michael Green

These days it reads hopelessly, helplessly outdated, but when Green's brilliant, funny and devastatingly charming and perceptive memoir of plodding through muddy fields in the Extra B team came out in the early 1960s, it changed rugby for ever. People realised for the first time that they were plodding along in a giant and magnificent freemasonry. Two years ago, its sales reached 250,000.

3. Goodbye to glory By Terry McLean

Tour books are ten a penny, and McLean, the doyen of New Zealand sports writers, tended to be happiest when his lads were winning and the ref was opting for the men in black. But this outstanding account of the 1976 All Blacks on a vivid, violent, politically incorrect and momentous tour of South Africa is the tour book supreme.

4. Total rugby By Jim Greenwood

Powerhouse. As the manual for coaches, unsurpassed. In fact, nothing has come remotely near it. The wise old Scot's coaching manual has gone through decades of different editions but the clarity is still wondrous. No coach of merit does not know it by heart.

5. Stand up and fight By Alan English

Only 80 minutes of a dull Munster day in 1978, when the local heroes beat New Zealand. But what a literary feast that win gave rise to. This classic re-wrote the manual for rugby books by mocking the drive towards unsatisfying surface rubbish. It is of supreme depth and colour and after reading it you will finally grasp Munster, and working-man rugby passion.