Jonny Wilkinson's self-lacerating introspection was in stark contrast to the thoughts of his Super League peer Leon Pryce
These are epic times for lovers of rugby. The confluence of the rugby union World Cup and the Super League play-offs means there is scarcely a moment in the day when you cannot watch blokes chucking a ball about ? or in the case of the 15-a-side game, scrabbling around on the floor after it.
Actually, that is an unwarranted calumny, I admit it, after a highly diverting weekend at the World Cup. As ITV's rather good commentator Nick Mullins said during a tight first half between Scotland and Argentina on Sunday: "There does not have to be a shed-load of tries for it to be entertaining." That was a view from which it was difficult to diverge. Scotland-Argentina may have been the most compelling televised sport of the weekend ? although I did feel that if Argentina's Amorosino had tried dancing down the Scotland wing as he did, against a league defence, say in the NRL, he would have been picking shards of advertising hoarding out of his limbs rather than scoring the match-winning try.
For those of the shed-load tendency it was not a bad weekend either, with England and Ireland scoring heavily against weaker teams, albeit at a time when many of you may have opted to remain in the arms of Morpheus. Not me, as it happens. I habitually rise in the hours before dawn, make a cup of tea in my pyjamas (we really must get a teapot ? Groucho Marx memorial joke), and mooch around in a gloomy, philosophical fuzz. The chance to lose oneself in live sport instead during those unforgiving hours has been a godsend, and ample justification in my view for the continued existence of the antipodes with their wacky time zones.
While I cannot give myself up to the rugby union World Cup quite as completely as Mullins ? not if I want to carry on drinking in some of the pubs around Wakefield ? the commentator was spot-on in exhorting the nation during the Scotland match to forget washing the car or walking the dog and stay glued to the TV.
Interestingly, neither of those was in my plans. What I normally do, should I be watching TV at that hour, is flip round between infomercials. I particularly like the one for the miracle car polish, where the guy sets fire to the bonnet of his car, puts out the flames, and then buffs the bodywork up with the wondrous solution to the amazement of the studio audience. I like the idea that one's first priority after driving through some kind of conflagration, a riot, say, a war zone, or maybe some post-nuclear disaster, might be to restore your car to "that perfect showroom finish".
But then for some people, everything has to be just so. Jonny Wilkinson, for instance. If the Scotland-Argentina match was pretty intense, it had nothing on Jonny's interview in the buildup to England's match against Romania. ITV had trailed it as an insight into "the complex world of Jonny Wilkinson", and it was not joking. While his colleagues may choose to wind down in night spots with a ready supply of alcohol, blondes, and small human projectiles, Jonny, you feel, would opt for a quiet evening of dark, self?lacerating, introspection.
"I feel I was massively overpraised and overcelebrated," was his assessment of his early success, while during the injury-plagued years post?2003: "I found out a lot about myself I wasn't happy with.
"I was struggling with who I was and where I was. I found myself desperately empty, and I got challenged massively by some of the values that I held in place for so long, which were no longer working for me. They challenged me and hurt me badly," quipped Jonny.
"Life's never been the same since that," he continued. "And it's been a constant effort to get back on the field, and to try and find that balance and that fantastic equilibrium that I had before those moments." In an era of bland, pointless interviews, Wilkinson's agonising was strangely bracing.
One doesn't want to trade in stereotypes, but Jonny's rugby league equivalents are possibly a little more down to earth. As coincidence would have it, one of league's great fly halves, St Helens's Leon Pryce, also gave a lengthy interview, in Super League Supermen, on Sky, and talked about problems he had faced. These were mainly to do with not being selected in his favoured position while playing for Bradford, and "saying stuff without thinking".
When on tour with Great Britain in Australia, Pryce found himself pestered by flies on Bondi Beach, and told a passing reporter: "I would rather be in Blackpool," turning him into a hate figure in Australia, and briefly a quarry of local newsmen. It did not seem to have prompted any Wilkinson-like existential angst, though, a reflection of a less complex sport, or maybe just a smaller goldfish bowl.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2011/sep/25/jonny-wilkinson-rugby-union-world-cup
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