SYDNEY - English superboot Jonny Wilkinson has revealed the secret to his goalkicking prowess: an imaginary woman called Doris.
Five years ago, when Wilkinson was preparing for his first test in the No 10 jersey against the Wallabies in Brisbane, he was having serious problems with his kicking technique.
Despite hours oftraining with England kicking coach Dave Alred he was spraying them all over the place as time ticked down to kickoff at Suncorp Stadium.
Alred eventually told Wilkinson to forget about technique and forget about the goalposts.
His advice was to imagine a lady sitting in the crowd behind the posts and try to hit her.
"She became known as Doris - we picked out a seat for her and tried to hit her," Wilkinson confided ahead of his team's pool C match against Samoa in Melbourne last night.
"And then we imagined her reading a newspaper and we tried to kick that out of her hands.
"When things were going a little better, we imagined her with a can of cola and we tried to hit that," he said in yesterday's Weekend Australian newspaper.
The results were not immediate. England got a kicking in Brisbane as they lost by a record 76-0. However, the unusual visualisation technique has since paid dividends.
"The idea was instead of aiming at the posts you were aiming at something specific 30 yards back and that way we changed the emphasis of where I was aiming. It made me really kick through the ball and it worked."
Wilkinson likened a practice session to a jigsaw puzzle.
"Every night you go to sleep you may have something on your mind that you have to deal with.
"That shakes the box up.
"When you kick the next day you're not the finished product any more.
"The aim of every kicking session, the reason I practise the way I do, is to find those pieces, and by the end of the session, to have packed them back in."
When Wilkinson fears he is in a flat patch he will change focus by "doing a few Dorises" or some "lazy sevens" - a lobbed seven-iron golf shot where he tries to land the ball on the crossbar.
"That blots out the panic of trying to get it over or on line - all you think about is the weight, you take the line for granted."
