Into the mindset of a super achiever

By CHRIS HEWETT

Jonny Wilkinson is renowned for his goal-kicking.

He is also renowned for a tackle-count the size of Alan Whetton's, concentration levels beyond human imagining and a courageous streak the width of the Wellington Cake Tin, where he broke a few All Black hearts back in June.

But it is the marksmanship that sets him apart. Some people in England claim he missed a difficult long-range conversion shortly after the Battle of Hastings, but it has not been officially documented. Wilkinson is the best at what he does, by a street.

One of England's phalanx of World Cup coaches, Dave Alred, believes Wilkinson is so far ahead of the field that the only useful sporting comparison is to be found in golf - Tiger Woods.

"I've spent a lot of time studying the psychological side of top-level golf, and I know Woods could hole every putt over 18 holes and not be happy with his putting," he said.

"Tiger operates at such a level now that what interests him deep down is not whether the ball goes in the hole, but whether all his putts hit the middle of the back of the cup. Because if they don't, he fails to achieve what he set out to achieve.

"In goal-kicking terms, that's where Jonny is. General technique is no longer the issue. The issue is pressure, and how he deals with it. When we practise, we do so on the basis of zero tolerance: there are no warm-up shots, no rehearsals, every kick in every session counts.

" ... What Jonny needs to know is whether each kick is 'top-pocket' (a perfect strike) and 'middle of the middle' (a perfect bisection of the H of the posts).

"If he takes six kicks and each meets both requirements, we can celebrate. But not for long. He'll have to do it again the following week."

Alred has been investigating the mindsets of leading sportsmen for years now, not least as part of major research undertaken at the behest of Loughborough University, and he sheds as much light as anyone on what makes Wilkinson tick.

Which is a blessed relief, given that Wilkinson himself is positively Trappist on the subject of himself. Five years ago, when he first broke into test rugby as a teenager, he was too shy to share his thoughts with others. Nowadays, the shutters come up because the public excesses of sporting celebrity horrify him.

He has no use for hero-worship and has absolutely no intention of being caught with his trousers down.

When he does agree to talk, he is rather less than thrilling. Why? Because he is a perfectionist and an obsessive. He does not discuss his life away from rugby because he does not have much of one.

Should England under-perform at this World Cup, as they did at the last tournament, he will be more upset than any of his countrymen; not just because four years of serious sweat will have ended in collective misery, but because he will have failed to achieve personal targets.

It may well be that Wilkinson thinks more deeply about the game, and for longer, than any player of his generation. He peered deep within himself at the end of the 1999 World Cup, when he was dropped to the bench the night before the Springbok first five-eighth Jannie de Beer drop-kicked England out of the competition at the quarter-final stage.

"Whenever I suffer a setback, I make myself a list of things that need to be worked on," he explained. "And at that particular point in my career, the list was longer than usual. In terms of effort, everything I could possibly have mustered went into my performances. But I suffered a lot from nerves, especially going into the pool match against New Zealand, and I realised at the time that I needed to be more competitive in certain situations.

"I found it difficult to step away from the intensity and step outside the hype, when I should have been seeing the big matches from a more controlled point of view. So I worked on my decision-making, on my adaptability, on my whole approach to dealing with pressure.

" ... I wanted to be able to think more clearly in the important moments. This game is all about thinking your way through a situation and reaching the right conclusions."

When Wilkinson comes out with this sort of stuff, it is difficult to believe he is still only 24.

He sounds like Gandalf. But he has already made 45 appearances for his country and scored more than 700 points at a match average of 15-plus, which is going it a bit.

This is not to say that everybody in England puts him on the right hand of God. Some call him one-dimensional - albeit a very good dimension - while others brand him robotic. Still others worry that he betrays a lack of creativity, the lack of the x-factor, especially when stacked against the Carlos Spencers of this world.

Wilkinson accepts this last criticism to a degree.

"I would like to think the creativity is there inside me. There again, I've never been much interested in taking a purely individualistic approach to the game.

"But I did admire some of the things the All Blacks produced against us at Twickenham before Christmas: the speed, power and athleticism they brought to their moves, their instinctive timing and ability to move our defence around the pitch. The sleight of hand, too. It's difficult to overstate the impact of that sort of trickery."

Needless to say, he is working on this side of his game. He works on all sides of it, all the time. And if England fail to win this World Cup, he will leave Australia with a list as long as his arm.

- INDEPENDENT