RUGBY:Chris Spice, the former performance director of the England Rugby Football Union, yesterday hit out at the governing body describing Andy Robinson as an accident waiting to happen.

"I'm not surprised by the present situation," said Spice yesterday, speaking from the United States where he has been coaching hockey for the past three months.

"A change should have been made last April and I said so at the time. I think the RFU were too cautious and would have been much better off starting afresh. It was always going to be difficult to bring in new people with the head coach still in place."

Robinson should have suffered the same fate as his assistants Phil Larder, Dave Alred and Joe Lydon following last season's Six Nations Championship said Spice, who resigned in protest at the decision to retain Robinson as head coach back in April, and he added that English rugby would continue to languish unless there was a top-level shake-up at Twickenham.

Spice, whose old role is now part of Rob Andrew's brief as elite rugby director, was also sceptical from the outset of the decision to dilute Robinson's selection powers.

"You undermine your head coach if someone else starts interfering in selection," he warned.

"Good head coaches should not need someone else to prop things up."

The English RFU is certainly not covering itself in glory regarding Robinson's protracted removal from office.

The 42-year-old is seeking compensation approaching £300,000 to cover the remaining 18 months of his contract but negotiations are taking longer than anticipated. Andrew left Twickenham just before 3pm yesterday without comment and there was a deafening silence from the press office.

Robinson should have been in Paris yesterday for the start of three days' World Cup planning meetings but his place was taken instead by the team manager Viv Brown.

Since Robinson was reprieved in April, England have lost five of their subsequent six Tests and the short-term outlook is unpromising with Ireland, France and Wales all eager to take advantage when the Six Nations starts in February.

Spice, though, believed England could not afford simply to write off the 2007 World Cup as a bad job - "You can't do that when you're the world champions" - and says the RFU hierarchy should hold up their own hands and acknowledge their part in England's downfall.

"They have to look at themselves," he stressed. "They also have to look at the process of how decisions affecting the elite game are made. Rather than relying on amateur committee men, there should be professionals in charge."

England have won just nine games during Robinson's time at the helm, their 13 defeats including a record-equalling run of seven successive losses between February and November this year.

As far as potential replacements for Robinson are concerned, speculation linking the former Wasps' director of rugby Warren Gatland with the post has not impressed his current employers in New Zealand. Waikato's chief executive Gary Dawson said Gatland, who is due to be involved in next year's Super 14 tournament as assistant coach of the Chiefs, is going nowhere. Dawson insisted that the man who led Waikato to the New Zealand Cup this year and has recently been appointed as assistant coach to the Chiefs would reject any advances from the English RFU. "I'm not expecting him to spring anything on us at all. There's nothing in this story."

The World Cup winning-captain Martin Johnson, who had also been mooted as a Robinson replacement, had no comment to make from Dubai, where he is spending time with his family ahead of the weekend's rugby sevens. The Harlequins' director of rugby Dean Richards is also among the contenders.

The boos of the crowd were still echoing around Twickenham on Saturday after England's eighth defeat in nine matches when the decision was made that the two-year reign of Robinson had to end. The RFU's chief executive, Francis Baron met Andrew, and the latter asked Robinson to hand in his resignation.

Robinson refused, saying that, if Twickenham wanted rid of him, he would have to be sacked.

However, once Robinson goes, which is inevitable, the danger for Baron is that he will have removed the lightning rod that was keeping criticism away from himself.

Johnson has already entered the fray, saying Baron should not be involved in rugby decisions. The chief executive was a key figure in the appointment of Robinson to succeed Clive Woodward in September 2004 and was an influential member of the review panel which last summer decided to sack the assistant coaches, Joe Lydon, Dave Alred and Phil Larder, rather than Robinson himself.

"When Clive resigned, I wondered about the succession," said Johnson.

"Appointing Robbo was the easy thing to do and it came down to Francis Baron who, not being a rugby man, was not informed enough to make such a decision. The buck does not just stop with Andy Robinson: it also stops with Baron, whose job is to provide for the management of the England team."

This month promised to be so different for Baron. November opened with a match against New Zealand to celebrate the rebuilding of Twickenham's South Stand, which has increased capacity to 82,000.

The decision to rebuild was taken in the heady days after the 2003 World Cup final, when England had the best bank balance and the best team in the world. But while the stadium, which will be complete next year when a hotel and leisure complex is built, may be champion, the team which plays in it is anything but.

Baron has survived three attempts to unseat him by elected members at Twickenham concerned at the power he has built up and feeling that he has tried to bypass the established decision-making process.

On the last occasion, two years ago, he was forced to resign as the chief executive of England Rugby Ltd, the joint club-country body set up to run the professional game, after a vote of no confidence. That led to a deterioration in relations with the Premiership clubs, undermining Robinson's attempts to get England back on track. In Baron's favour he has transformed the English RFU's finances since becoming chief executive eight years ago. The union currently has £28 million in the bank, although it announced a £3.6 million drop in turnover earlier this month. Guardian Service