by Peter Burns
Reverting to Dweck’s theories, Wilkinson also showed an impressive growth mindset and appetite for new information – he wanted to know as much as he could to improve himself as a player. From a very early age he showed a deep desire to become the world’s best rugby player, but he never once thought that he was naturally gifted enough for it to just happen for him. His deep self-doubts pushed him ever onwards and he absorbed information insatiably. He was not alone in the England environment in having this open-minded drive for self-improvement. As Woodward writes in Winning!, ‘I’ve never met a quality player intent on winning who didn’t want to hear about ways he could improve his game. The greatest compliment I can give to players like Martin Johnson and Jonny Wilkinson would be to tell you of their thirst for knowledge. They are sponges for new ideas and real quality coaching.’
And this was why Alred so enjoyed working with Wilkinson. The boy loved to learn and he worked tirelessly to improve himself. He had already put in thousands and thousands of hours of kicking practice at home on his own, with his brother and father, at school and with various representative teams. Now it was a case of refining his technique; and from there Wilkinson would happily continue to put in the hours of work, forever chasing perfection.
‘At the highest level,’ said Alred, ‘kicking is 40 per cent technique, 60 per cent mental. Test match kickers will have honed their techniques, but the difference between the truly great kickers and the others is the ability to cope with the pressure of the situation. Jonny, for example, is mentally very strong – he can block out all the external factors, everything in that stadium, and kick the goal. It says a lot about him. We developed a number of different techniques to help him with that focus. The sweet spot that you want to hit is around three or four inches up from the tip of the ball. So that’s the area you want to strike with the hardened ball of your big toe. But to get real accuracy with that, you want to focus on a specific target within that sweet spot, so I would ask Jonny to pick out an individual stitch and aim for that. It’s partly about technique, partly a mental exercise. If you hit that stitch and hit it hard, then it should be the ideal strike. But it’s also a way of dealing with the pressure. If you’re concentrating hard on trying to find the stitch, then you naturally block out everything else that’s going on around you. If you’re solely focused on that stitch, then nothing else should distract you.
‘Then we looked at the target. Again, we focused on narrowing the target down. You don’t just want to focus on some vague space between the posts – there is too much margin for error, too many things to distract you. In Jonny’s case we made up an imaginary woman sitting in the stands right between the posts, holding a Coke can. She sits some thirty yards behind the posts and Jonny does two things – first, he imagines a blue line attaching the ball to the Coke can, and second, he visualises knocking the can out of her hand with the ball. That’s his target. Another way to think of it is like aiming to kick a barn door – you need to aim for the keyhole to guarantee hitting the door. If you can hit the keyhole, you know that hitting the door is just a formality. With Jonny, I always expect him to kick his goals, but what we get fussy about is whether we’ve hit the keyhole – or, in his case, the Coke can.
‘So he sets himself, looks along the blue line, sees the Coke can, then returns his focus to the stitch on the ball. When he begins his approach to the ball, all his focus is on the stitch, the hardness of his foot and the follow-through of his leg. All the power of the kick comes from his body weight, not from the swing of his leg. It’s like a golf swing – the power of the swing comes from the rotation of the waist; in rugby, the power of the kick comes from the rotation of the hips. When Jonny is readying himself for the kick he hardens his toe and bangs it against the ground. This pushes his toe to the extreme edge of his boot and also replicates the feeling of striking the ball. Then he centres his weight. I got the idea from baseball – it’s a technique used to centre the body’s balance, to reach a comfortable equilibrium so that you are in complete control of your body. It is vital that players understand how their weight is distributed and have a point of reference for what it feels like to be totally balanced and centred – for Jonny, the crouch does that and his raised hands is all about him finding his central balance; it’s a focal point for him, a reference that tells him he’s ready.
‘The next step is to imagine the power of his balanced weight sitting behind his navel. It’s like a hot glow and he focuses that power into his leg and down into his foot. When he is ready he approaches the ball; you want to come round in a J shape so that you are square on to the ball when you strike it. You want to be looking to step through the kick so that the weight and momentum of your body is what drives the power through the ball – just like a golf swing. And like a golf swing it’s important to keep your head down. If you do all that, you’ll hit the Coke can.’
Wilkinson first played international rugby for England Under-16 before progressing to the Under-18 A side and from there to the full England Under-18 team that went on to win a Grand Slam – with Wilkinson scoring a last-minute forty-yard drop-goal against Wales in the final game to secure the clean sweep. On the back of that championship, he was selected for the Under-18s’ tour of Australia, which saw them clinch a resounding 38–20 win over their Australian counterparts at the North Sydney Oval. When he returned home, his rugby education continued to rocket ever upwards.
With the advent of professionalism in 1995, Sir John Hall had bought Gosforth RFC/Newcastle Gosforth, rebranded them as Newcastle Falcons and moved swiftly to make the Division Two side a force to be reckoned with. He recruited Rob Andrew as both a player and as director of rugby and, as well as signing a host of international players such as Pat Lam, Tony Underwood, Dean Ryan, Alan Tait, Nick Popplewell, Garath Archer, Gary Armstrong and Doddie Weir, and rugby union’s first million-pound signing in All Black Va’aiga Tuigamala, assigned the role of head coach to Steve Bates. In their first season, Newcastle won promotion to the First Division and Bates moved to recruit his young protégé from Lord Wandsworth College to join their ranks. Wilkinson was incredibly nervous about making the move from his home in the south of England to the north-east, but he was thrilled by the opportunity and would soon flourish in the ultra-professional environment at Newcastle.
He was a student of the game and, with such illustrious and experienced teammates around him, immersed himself in their collective knowledge.
Unlike most fly-halves before him, Wilkinson dedicated himself to the hard yards, to the dark and dirty parts of the game. He realised that the weakest link in a side’s defensive chain was usually down the fly-half’s channel. No.10s are traditionally slight players, who pass on shoddy ball, kick the leather of it to relieve pressure and run only when gaps open up for them. No matter the time of year or whether they are playing on the boggiest, quagmire-like pitch, the fly-half in any game is invariably barely mud-splattered come the final whistle. Tackling was not what fly-halves were on the pitch to do – that was a job for the back-row to do for them. But Wilkinson realised that to play like that would make him a weakness in the team and would require another player to work even harder to cover for his defciencies, potentially opening up spaces in the defence elsewhere. And he couldn’t allow that. So he threw himself into weight training, honed his technique and abandoned any notion of self-preservation to become a defensive rock. He didn’t just absorb the impact of the ofensive runner, he would halt them in their tracks with a juddering hit and drive them backwards into the turf. Some of the hits that he put in were extraordinary – they lifted his teammates’ spirits, brought the crowd to its feet and lowered the heads of the opposition – all in a moment of power, timing, perfect technique and, most crucially, unerring bravery. The cost to his own body would prove to be devastating, but it is unlikely that even the briefest consideration for his long-term health would have flitted through his thoughts.
But his dedication to the cause in preference to personal safety went
beyond defensive tackle duties. He would throw his body anywhere he felt his team needed it to be: into rucks, onto loose balls, towards the swinging boots of opposition players as they tried to clear their lines.
And then there was the kicking. Rob Andrew, his predecessor in the England No.10 shirt and his mentor at Newcastle, along with Andrew’s fly-half contemporaries Grant Fox, Michael Lynagh and Joel Stransky, had taken a dedication to kicking practice to a level never before seen in the game. But Wilkinson took it into the stratosphere.
Wilkinson’s ability to deliver time and time again under the most severe pressure meant that, as time progressed, opposition teams very soon learnt to avoid giving away needless penalties anywhere in their own half. And in so doing, Newcastle (and, in due course, England) found that the ball would emerge more quickly from rucks, that mauls would seldom be pulled down and that space would open up for them across the field. Thanks to Wilkinson’s endeavours, the opposition were forced to play more closely to the rules and England were given the time to control the pace of the game, to dictate which areas of the field they played in, and the space to dismantle any defence they came up against. And if they couldn’t break down the defence, if that defence stayed honest and true and wouldn’t give up a penalty, Wilkinson would retreat back into the pocket and drop a goal. The scoreboard would tick on with a sense of unrelenting inevitability. There was no one in the world who could keep the points mounting like Jonny Wilkinson in his pomp.
But Wilkinson’s obsessive dedication would prove to be even more harmful than the reckless abandon with which he threw himself in the path of rampaging runners. He would suffer serious groin problems, shearing the muscle away from the bone thanks to his repetitive kicking motion, twice tear a medial knee ligament, break a shoulder and suffer a lacerated kidney. But the most damaging fallout was psychological. Read any interview with Wilkinson since he emerged on the scene or read any of his own biographical works and you will see before you a lost and troubled soul, an obsessive, wedded to his passion for his sport and his unerring quest for perfection – a quest that brought him global fame, success and adulation, a quest that made him an inspiration and a hero to millions, a quest that set him in the pantheon of sporting icons, but a quest that has haunted his life. ‘I’ve had days where, having already been out for around two hours, I’ve wanted to finish with six kicks, fairly easy ones, and then I was going home,’ said Wilkinson in the documentary Perfect Ten, ‘and those six kicks have taken an hour and a half. I get very stubborn and I refuse to leave until those six kicks are perfect – because it felt like a challenge someone was putting to me.’
Protected to some degree by the low profile of rugby in the north-east of England while at Newcastle, Wilkinson shunned the spotlight as much as he could before eventually making the leap to join Toulon in the south of France in 2009. There, although the locals and the press were feverish about his presence at the club, he was eventually able to establish a sanctuary away from the clamour and start to find a path towards peace. He became a central cog in a Toulon team bursting with world-class talent, a local hero and a legend across France, a match-winner time and time again. In 2013 he helped Toulon claim the Heineken Cup; in the quarter-final, semi-final and the final of that tournament, he enjoyed 100 per cent accuracy with his goal-kicks. His dedication to training and his pursuit of perfection hardly dimmed at Toulon, but there was a sense that he had begun to find more balance in his life. Whether he has found enough will be put to the test when he finally hangs up his boots and walks from the pitch for that final time and into retirement. His has been a life lived for rugby. For those millions who have looked on with open-mouthed awe at his dedication and skill, there is nothing but hope that he can find a life of contentment and happiness beyond the rugby arena.
But for where we are in this story, many of these woes lie in the future. Here we are in the spring of 1999 and Jonny is nineteen years old. Boyishly handsome, with barely a blemish on his clean-shaven face, he is nervous in the international environment but anxious to show his esteemed colleagues exactly what he can do. He is a child among figures like Johnson, Back, Guscott and Leonard. But as a stand-off, he must be the one to boss them around on the field, to dictate play, make tactical decisions and establish the rhythm of the game.
He looked around the faces in the room at the Petersham Hotel. These were his childhood heroes, players he dreamed of emulating – not playing with. And certainly not telling them what to do.
Clive Woodward pushed open the door at the back of the room and marched in with Roger Uttley, Brian Ashton, Phil Larder, Phil Keith-Roach, Dave Reddin and Dave Alred hot on his heels. As the entourage took their seats at the head of the room, Woodward stood forward and welcomed the squad to the meeting.
‘We’ll head to the bus shortly,’ said Woodward, referring to the coach that would ferry the team between the hotel and the nearby training grounds owned by the Bank of England. ‘But first I want us to go over the attacking strategies that we’ll be running through at training.’
He moved to a flip board and turned to a new sheet. He looked up.
‘Jonny, could you come up here and talk us through some of the moves you think we should be employing in their red zone off set-piece play, please?’
Wilkinson’s stomach dropped. Not again...
He swallowed hard, stood up and, averting his eyes from the faces of the other players, moved towards the flip board. He took a black marker pen from Woodward, who gave him a brief but reassuring pat on the shoulder before taking his seat next to Ashton.
Amid the fallout from the Tour of Hell and his recovery from injury, Wilkinson had been dropped from the squad for the 1998 Autumn Tests, but was brought back into the fold for the 1999 Five Nations. The coaching team recognised that he was still too insular for their liking and felt that if he wasn’t comfortable telling the senior players exactly what he wanted from them, then he wasn’t ready to run the game from stand-off. But he was too talented to leave out, and so they moved him back to centre and played Paul Grayson at 10, allowing Wilkinson to learn from his more experienced colleague. Wilkinson was a project, a work in progress. Woodward continued to bring the focus in meetings back to Wilkinson, moving him to the front of the room and asking him questions; during training runs he would stop play and ask Wilkinson his thoughts, would ask him to analyse what they were doing and whether they were executing the correct moves at the correct time in the correct part of the pitch. Wilkinson hated it all – but he was slowly getting used to it. His ambition to play for England, to be the best that he could be, was so powerful that he forced away his fears and his doubts as best he could, gradually becoming inured to the attention and slowly beginning to feel more comfortable in his surroundings.
But he still hated having to stand up in front of everyone. He looked at the blank sheet of paper and silently began to draw symbols and arrows of movement on the board. But he knew he had to speak up, so he cleared his throat and began – taking deep, slow breaths between sentences to try to steady his quavering voice. And as he began to drill down into the detail of the moves, he felt himself relaxing; his voice became more assured and his wrist began to flick quickly and easily across the sheets of paper as he illustrated sweeping attacking lines, changes of direction, pockets of space and areas of weakness in the opposition defence. For a while he slipped into a comfortable zone and was able to forget everything else in the world except the game.
Only when he had finished and turned to face the room again did the anxiety return. What if they disagreed? What if they thought he was childishly naive? What if they thought he was a fraud? He looked at Dallaglio and Johnson, then over to Dawson, Hill and Back, who were all sitting together. They were all nodding. They were happy – and a wave of relief flooded over him.
‘Well done, Jonny,’ said Woodward. ‘Everyone happy? Good. Then let’s go.’ And with that the meeting was over. The players filed out of the room, ready to begin putting Jonny’s moves into
practice.
*
Six men were sitting together in a meeting room at the Petersham Hotel: Lawrence Dallaglio, Martin Johnson, Jason Leonard, Jeremy Guscott, Matt Dawson and Paul Grayson. All six were Lions – Johnson and Leonard the veterans of two tours, Guscott of three, and each had played on the 1997 tour of South Africa. They formed a senior group of players within the England team. Sometimes they would be joined by Phil de Glanville, Richard Hill and Neil Back; sometimes the group would be distilled down to just Dallaglio, Johnson and one or two of the others. But today there were six.
It was a week before the opening round of the 1999 Five Nations – the last time the championship would be known as that before it became the Six Nations in 2000 with the inclusion of Italy. England had had to sit out the first round of matches and all their focus was on playing Scotland at Twickenham in two weeks’ time.
The meeting room had a special status within the England camp. It was known as the ‘war room’ and it was for serious discussions only. No phones, no jokes, no messing around. The team room was the place for socialising, relaxing, and spending an enjoyable time together. It represented an important psychological compartmentalisation – it separated downtime from the serious business of professional athletes. The war room was the equivalent of a company’s boardroom and Woodward was explicit in his desire to make it as focused as possible. It had a cool and businesslike atmosphere – when the players were caught up in thundering chaos of a Test match, they could return to the strategies and tactics discussed, refined and honed in the war room; it was an oasis of calm that they could cling to in moments of bedlam.
