Rugby's answer to Tiger Woods
Jonny Wilkinson kicks 50 goals a day, every day, in his search for perfection and applies the same relentless standards to the rest of his game. At Twickenham the Australians face an England points-scoring phenomenon.
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Your support makes all the difference.Jonathan Peter Wilkinson is the best outside-half in world rugby. The accuracy of this uncomplicated statement can most usefully be measured, if it can be measured at all, in the words of those many international-class coaches who strew palms beneath Wilkinson's size 10 feet, both of which he uses to kick goals in unprecedented volume. They no longer agonise over whether he performs this task better than Andrew Mehrtens or that skill better than Stephen Larkham. When Wilkinson is mentioned in the same breath as that of a fellow sportsman, it tends to be the most celebrated sportsman of the age: a golfer by the name of Tiger.
Listen to Dave Alred, the specialist kicking coach to the England rugby team and a man who knows very nearly as much about propelling an oval-shaped ball between two wooden sticks as Mozart knew about crotchets and quavers. "I've spent a lot of time studying the psychological side of top-level golf, and I know Tiger Woods could hole every putt over 18 holes and not be happy with his putting. He 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. We're looking inside the statistics; mere percentages are gobbledegook at this point in his development. 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."
Of course, there is more to wearing the No 10 shirt than putting boot to ball: some of the greatest stand-offs of the post-war era – Jackie Kyle of Ireland, Mark Ella of Australia – were not front-line international marksmen. But when Wilkinson is not aiming 50 balls a day at a distant set of posts in Newcastle, where he plays his club rugby, or in the back garden of a four-postered country club in Bagshot, where England have been preparing for this afternoon's Test match against Australia at Twickenham, he is applying his uniquely perfectionist approach to a dozen other areas of the stand-off's game. No one works harder at being a hard-working rugby player. As one of his team-mates put it, only half-jokingly, this week: "The thing about Jonny's life is that it isn't really a life."
Well, Jonny's non-life is not as shabby as all that. At 23, he has scored 554 points in 36 appearances for his country, and is England's record scorer by the small matter of 158 from Rob Andrew, his guide and philosopher king at Newcastle. (It took Andrew 70 Tests and several centuries to accumulate 396 points: ridiculously, Wilkinson passed him in his 27th match, against France at Twickenham last year, when he was still 48 days short of his 22nd birthday). Neil Jenkins, of Wales, is the only man in rugby history to top 1,000 points, and is still playing. But Wilkinson, who is halfway to catching him, has as many years left at the top level as Jenkins has months.
It is a long time since England last laid claim to the best outside-half on the planet; indeed, many would assert that no Englishman of the last 50-odd years could reasonably be credited with supremacy in the most influential position of all. Many red rose 10s, from Nim Hall and Ivor Preece in the immediate post-war period to Andrew and Stuart Barnes in the modern era, could play a bit, but alongside Kyle and Morgan, John and Bennett, Ella and Porta, Lynagh and Jonathan Davies, they do not seem quite so hot.
Perhaps, just perhaps, a case could be made for the super-pukkah student triumvirate of the early 1960s: Phil Horrocks-Taylor of Cambridge University, Richard Sharp of Oxford University and Bev Risman of Manchester University. Between them, they played five Lions Tests and won 31 caps for their country. But who could say for sure that Pierre Albaladejo of France, or Keith Oxlee of South Africa, did not have a tiny edge on them? If only the gods of Twickenham had rolled the three into one.
The point about Wilkinson is that he frequently plays a three-in-one game, kicking like Jenkins, tackling like Henry Honiball and taking care of business with the quiet ruthlessness of a sporting Michael Corleone. Only when an opponent pulls a rabbit clean out of the hat, as Mehrtens did during the second half of last weekend's England-New Zealand Test, does he occasionally fall under someone else's shadow. He does not possess Mehrtens' soft hands, the priceless ability to caress a pass going right and then fire out a bullet going left. Not yet, anyway. Needless to say, he is working on it.
"I'd like to think the creativity is there inside me," he said this week. "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: the speed, power and athleticism they brought to 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.
"We were not massively pleased with our own performance. It was our first game back after a longish break and sometimes you need that one run to get tuned in again. I admit we were predictable, though; while it's not something we like saying about ourselves, we had to accept the charge last Saturday. We intend to step up a level against the Wallabies this weekend."
Ah, the Wallabies. The Wilkinson story turned its first page against these opponents, in Brisbane in 1998. A wide-eyed boy not long out of school, the poor lad missed an absolute sitter of a penalty early on and finished up on the wrong end of 76 unanswered points. A month later, sitting in the corner of the departure lounge of Cape Town airport at the end of what became known as the "tour of hell", he was injured, depressed and suffering from the rugby equivalent of shell-shock.
Since then, his standards have shot through the roof and burned a hole in the ozone layer. Will he fall off those standards one day? You can only kick 50 goals a day for so long, after all. Wilkinson considers the question for an age. "I cannot accept going into a game less than fully prepared," he said, eventually. "If I didn't feel I was right, I couldn't sleep at night... and I don't have trouble sleeping. No, I won't fall off my standards. The moment that happens, I'll pack in rugby and do something else."
Equally as well, probably.
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