Josh Lewsey, England's World Cup-winning full back of 2003, is expected to announce his retirement from international rugby today, bringing to an end an illustrious career for his country spanning ten years.

Lewsey, 32, won 55 caps, the last of which was in the World Cup semi-final against France in 2007. He scored the game's only try in a 14-9 win before limping off with a damaged hamstring, an injury that forced him to miss the final.

He fell out of favour with Brian Ashton, the England head coach at the time, for this year's RBS Six Nations Championship and Martin Johnson, the England team manager, ignored him for the autumn internationals despite having included him in the inaugural elite player squad. Last month, Lewsey was released back to London Wasps, with whom his one-year contract expires at the end of the season. With the subsequent emergence of Delon Armitage in the heavy defeats by Australia, South Africa and New Zealand and several young wings seemingly ahead of him in the queue, Lewsey must have wondered whether the writing was on the wall.

In an England shirt, Lewsey scored 22 tries and was recognised as a player of pace, power, strength and bravery, who could pick great angles from his preferred position of full back and relished physical confrontation. He could never quite make one position his own, however, and his versatility led him to appear 27 times at full back, 12 on the right wing, 11 on the left and once at inside centre, on his debut on the 1998 “Tour from Hell”, when he featured twice at fly half after an injury to Jonny Wilkinson. He was also twice named on the bench.

He will be best remembered for his heroics in the No15 shirt with the crunching tackle on Mat Rogers that damaged the Australian's rib cartilage in 2003 and his cover tackle on Jean de Villiers, the South African, at Twickenham in 2006, and another on Jonah Lomu in 1998. As a wing, the try in the Stade de France in October last year silenced the home crowd, a score that paved the way for England's unlikely appearance in the World Cup final.

Lewsey has always been an individual in the monochrome world of professional rugby. He has never been afraid to speak his mind, even if it has meant alienating colleagues. His training ground spat with Danny Cipriani, the Wasps fly half, made front-page headlines this season.

He has invariably chosen to do things his way. Holidays, for instance, were not for lying on a beach but for adventure and new experiences, be it climbing in the Himalayas and becoming ill through oxygen starvation, or working as a cowboy on a ranch in Midwest America. He also found time to combine rugby with an army career. He passed out from Sandhurst in 2001 and spent two years with the Royal Artillery.

Lewsey could have played for Wales because his mother is Welsh and his father half-Welsh. Instead, he opted for England, having joined Wasps as an 18-year-old before a sojourn with Bristol while reading physiology at Bristol University. He has many interests outside the game and in his testimonial year supported two charities close to his heart, the Prince's Trust and specifically its work with underprivileged children, and the Army Benevolent Fund, with many of London's homeless coming from a Services background.

“I consider myself very fortunate to have stumbled across something that I am quite good at [rugby] and able to play professionally and enjoy,” he said in March. “A lot of people are not that lucky.

“I went to one school where a lot of children had no aspiration. Some were from second or third-generation unemployed families. There is increasingly a larger divide between the educated classes and a social underclass. Unless something is done to try to bridge that gap, it will only worsen.”

Given his nature, it would not be a surprise if he felt his ultimate future lay in these areas.

Meanwhile, Ross Rennie, the Edinburgh flanker, has been cited for a dangerous tackle on Paul Sackey, the Wasps wing, during his side's Heineken Cup defeat at Murrayfield last Friday.