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  TIM HORAN, FORMER WALLABY CENTRE: I remember Noddy having problems in England. Whenever he practised, he did this strange thing where he never lined up directly in front. Instead, he aimed at one post—almost as if he wanted to take the actual getting the ball between the posts out of the equation.

  On and on it went. All these insecurities and peripheral questions were in my head during every game. I tried to fix it in the practice sessions by getting the guys to run at me to simulate charge-downs. I kicked goals from every conceivable place in every pitch before each match. I lay in bed every night before games, rehearsing every kick I could possibly be presented with the next day. On the surface, and on paper, I was getting through the World Cup. But in my mind it was as big a challenge as it had ever been. Every kick was a battle. The demons just wouldn’t leave me.

  IAN LYNAGH: I was over in the UK with Michael and I even went out on the training pitch with him one day to try and help. He was spraying even the simplest kicks because he was really caught up in his own head. To me, that was indicative of the huge trauma he’d gone through when missing that kick in Auckland. His confidence was blown apart. Michael can be a bit obsessive in terms of detail sometimes and I believe that he was overthinking everything during the World Cup in 1991.

  It was no consolation to me to consider that I probably wasn’t alone in having these problems. I was only concerned with what I was doing. In any case, it wasn’t the kind of thing you discussed with other goal-kickers. There’s an unspoken rule that you don’t admit to your problems, certainly not while you’re still playing.

  GRANT FOX: I understand Michael’s mental anguish. It’s a little bit like John Kirwan [former All Black winger] talking about depression. I played a lot of rugby with JK and he never shared it, nor did I notice it. It’s only now, all these years later, that he comes out with what he was going through. Michael’s problems with goal-kicking were never obvious to me. I never even sensed it. Having heard it, I now understand it. Nowadays, whenever I’m asked to coach youngsters, the first question I ask is: ‘Do you want to be the goal-kicker? Do you want to stand in front of 50,000 people and the millions watching on television? If you don’t relish that attention and can’t cope with what comes with it, best you leave now.’ But it was only once I stopped playing that I began to think about it in those terms.

  With hindsight, it occurred to me that my reluctance to disclose or discuss my problems was like the attitude of a golfer who has just come off the course after a bad round. They’ll never actually say they played badly. That would be counter-productive and would undermine what little remaining positivity they have left. ‘I missed a few putts today but I’ll go away and work on it—we’ll be okay. I’m in a good place,’ is what they say, not, ‘I’m playing badly and I’ve no idea what to do about it.’ They always keep it positive. It’s as if by saying these things, it somehow makes them true. The same applies to goal-kickers: they’ll never admit they’re struggling.

  I WAS RECENTLY REMINDED of how I used to feel. I was watching an international with my eldest son. It was an autumn Saturday in 2013. The goal-kicker for one side was lining up a last-minute penalty that would have given his team a pretty significant win. It wouldn’t be fair of me to name names and it doesn’t actually matter; it’s just an example. It wasn’t, in the scheme of things, a difficult kick: it was ten or fifteen metres wide of the right-hand post—the kind of kick that should be considered routine, even in a high-pressure situation, as this was. Just as the goal-kicker drew breath and settled for a few seconds longer than you might expect at the beginning of his run-up, my son turned to me and said, ‘I reckon he’s going to miss this.’ I was interested in his intuition. ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘Oh, he’s just taking too long. He’s worried.’

  ‘Mate,’ I said, ‘that’s really perceptive of you. You are absolutely right.’

  And of course he did miss the kick and I think he’s had a problem with kicks like that since then—not that he’d ever dream of admitting it.

  As an international goal-kicker in the modern game, unless you’re kicking 85 per cent plus, you’re not really delivering. The stadiums nowadays are enclosed, the pitches are perfect and players practise all day, every day. Everything’s in your favour.

  But you’ve still got to put the ball down and kick it. . .

  In recent years, Jonny Wilkinson has been responsible for taking goal-kicking to the incredible level it is currently at. I don’t know Jonny very well. I’m not sure if anyone really does. He’s a complete one-off. But none of the top guys miss much nowadays because Jonny showed them how not to. And a lot of that is due to his incredible work ethic. Jonny has taken that part of the game to new levels also. But I’m sure he’d give a lot of credit to his kicking coach, Dave Aldred, who also coached the golfer Luke Donald. I’m guessing that Aldred kept Jonny focused less on overthinking and more on the act of striking the ball. Even so, I’d be surprised if even Jonny hadn’t had days when he thought, ‘Oh no, I don’t want to have to kick this.’ We’ve all had those days.

  GRANT FOX: Sometimes I didn’t want the opportunity. I’d sometimes think, ‘Don’t give us a penalty. I don’t want to step up.’ I can’t recall specific instances when it happened, but I’m not denying that it happened. Generally, when I missed one in my early days, I thought, ‘I want to get back on the horse quickly.’ I got pissed off for missing and wanted another opportunity. In my mid-career, my expectations became unrealistic and that’s when the doubt set in—‘I don’t want the opportunity.’ Then you learn to isolate everything kick by kick, reconciling the years of practice. A bad kick is just a bad kick. You isolate it. For the next kick, you focus on the process, not the negative thoughts. Trust that you know how to do it—trust the mechanics. But it’s hard to get to that point when you can separate the mental and the physical process.

  When you think about it, the similarities between swinging a golf club and kicking a rugby ball are remarkable. They are both stationary objects. And if you substitute the kicking leg for a golf club, the rest comes down to repeating the same routine and mechanics time after time—grooving yourself to repeat the same movement, regardless of conditions. The only difference is that the golfers get paid a little more for doing it.

  I remember that on more than a few occasions before big games my dad would take me down to the driving range just to loosen me up by hitting a few golf balls. It was helpful on a couple of levels. First, it took me away from that awful sitting about, feeling physically sick with nerves about goal-kicking. Secondly, it was all about going through the ball towards your target. Dad really understood that connection.

  But in golf, when you’re lining up a twenty-foot putt or hitting a tee shot into a par three, nobody’s been tackling you and wrestling you to the ground for the few minutes prior to that. Golfers are able to stay in the same calm mode, but rugby players in the midst of a full-contact situation simply can’t.

  This golf–rugby analogy was reinforced for me when I played in the 2005 Wales Open golf pro-am at Celtic Manor with Michael Campbell from New Zealand. He was playing beautifully that day and made a few excellent putts. But he’d had a pretty shocking year to that point. On the way from one of the greens to the next tee I chatted to his caddie: ‘Why is he having such a poor year? He’s hitting the ball great.’

  ‘He’s starting to get there . . . it’s coming,’ the caddie said, with a bit of a knowing gleam in his eye.

  When we reached the par three 13th hole there were a couple of groups waiting to play in front of us. Michael—a big rugby fan—and I sat down on a bench together and he struck up a non-golf-related conversation.

  ‘So . . .’ he said, ‘did you ever have any problems with your goal-kicking?’

  ‘Definitely, mate,’ I said, and because we had a bit of a wait until we were up on the tee, I had plenty of time to tell him a story about the 1984 Wallaby tour to the UK—the Grand Slam Tour.

  I was the ki
cker. I was playing centre; Mark Ella was at ten.

  I didn’t kick well against England. Didn’t kick well against Ireland. I was dropped for the goal-kicking against Wales; Roger Gould took over and kicked everything. Everything. I scored a try. We won the game and even then I was thinking, ‘Jeez, I might not get this job back.’

  ALAN JONES: The publicity surrounding this Australian team just kept building and building. There was a lot of pressure on them. Michael was starting to get a bit wayward with his kicking after the Ireland game so I thought I’d give him a rest from it all. We were on a visit to the Waterford Crystal factory in Ireland and I called him out. ‘Look, you’ve had a really hard tour—a lot of pressure. I’m going to take the pressure away from you. I’m taking you off the goal-kicking.’ Straight away, this serious little face looked at me and said, ‘Are you dropping me?’ ‘Will you wake up?’ I said. ‘Of course I’m not dropping you. You’ll be in the Test against Wales; I just don’t want you to kick goals.’ He didn’t even ask who was going to kick goals—he was as happy as a pig in mud.

  We arrived in Scotland for the Grand Slam decider. Alan Jones couldn’t decide who the kicker was going to be. Me, who couldn’t kick a goal in the matches, or Roger Gould, who couldn’t miss one. It was pretty obvious, you’d think.

  IAN LYNAGH: Kicking is not an intellectual thing. It’s a psycho-motor action. So the more you can keep your head out of it, the better you’ll do. You’ve got to trust the feeling. The problem was that Alan Jones’s way is to intellectualise everything. He’d stand next to Michael when he was practising and that wasn’t helping, although Alan was genuinely trying to help. Michael rang me a few times on that trip, worried about what was happening. ‘You’re getting too much input, first of all,’ I told him. Then I made him a relaxation tape and sent it over. I also had a few other ideas to do with the position he was playing.

  I’d been talking to Dad on the phone during that week—‘At training I can’t miss, but in the games they’re just missing.’

  And soon he’d worked out why. It was because I was playing centre as opposed to flyhalf. During the midweek games I’d been playing flyhalf and kicking everything. But when I went to centre to play outside Mark Ella, which in those days was a much more confrontational, defensive position than flyhalf, my kicking was influenced by the fact that I was playing at a much higher arousal level physically. So when I came to do the goal-kicking, my heart rate was up—everything was at high intensity and functioning that bit quicker. As a result, the kicks were just off. Not much, but enough. At training, you’re not in the same elevated state. I thought, ‘That’s genius.’

  One day at training before the Scotland game, Roger and I had a kick-off. Alan Jones was watching. I couldn’t miss; Roger couldn’t miss. Jonesy ended up calling me into his room on the Saturday morning to give me the goal-kicking duties. He said, ‘You’ll be kicking today—I trust you.’ It was a very tough call that he made. I think he thought that his brilliant management of me was the key. He had handled it well; he always did. He was massively intelligent. He understood people, me included. But the real reason was that Dad had discovered what had been causing me the problems.

  NICK FARR-JONES: Alan Jones’s main strength was knowing how to handle people. I remember him giving me a pretty solid kick up the arse on that tour and that was precisely what I needed. He perceived me as being a guy who just went on tour to have fun. That was true, but I also prepared and worked my arse off. With Michael, Jones knew how to handle his sensitivities. Michael and I were great friends, but very different people. Jones recognised that difference.

  Dad had given me something to think about, and then he came up with a great suggestion. ‘When there’s a penalty or conversion, what I want you to do is press, subconsciously, a slow-motion button.’ His theory applied to everything that happened after the whistle was blown for a penalty or in the preparation for a conversion attempt. Breathing, walking, talking, fixing the ball, interacting with the ball boy—everything was to be done in slow motion.

  I practised the slow-motion technique and then when I went out for the game at Murrayfield, I slotted the first one over from way out on the left touchline. It went right down the middle. Beautiful. I then kicked an Australian record, pressing the slow-motion button every time.

  So I told Michael Campbell all this. ‘Wow, that’s fantastic,’ he said. We went on to finish in the top five as a team and he finished fourth in the whole event.

  Afterwards, we had a few beers. I asked him what was next.

  ‘I’ve got to go to the US Open Qualifier at Walton Heath on Monday, with about a hundred others.’

  Because he hadn’t been playing well, he didn’t even want to go. He thought he had no chance. But his caddie had talked him into it—‘Come on mate, what have we got to lose?’

  He qualified. Just. Got into the US Open at Pinehurst. Next thing you know he was posting a last-day 69 to hold off Tiger Woods by two shots and win. After he hit his tee shot on the eighteenth into the rough and hacked it out into the fairway, he left the course for a toilet break. Then he came back to play the most important shot of his life: a chip over a bunker that he knocked close to the hole. He’d had a similar shot at Walton Heath to qualify in the first place. On both occasions, he holed the putts.

  I texted him straight afterwards to say congratulations and four or five days later he got back to me.

  ‘Mate, thanks very much. I pressed the slow-motion button on the eighteenth.’

  He’d followed my advice. It worked for him, or so he told me.

  THE LEAST IMPORTANT MOMENT of the 1991 World Cup quarterfinal against Ireland was the conversion attempt I had with seconds winding down. Given how I was feeling about goal-kicking, it was quite refreshing that I didn’t have to get it. And I didn’t get it. But we’d all but won the game anyway.

  Sir Clive Woodward, the England coach, had a concept called TCUP that he used with his World Cup winning team in 2003. It stands for ‘Thinking Clearly Under Pressure’. Someone once told me that Woodward held up my decision-making during the last five minutes of the 1991 World Cup quarterfinal in Dublin as being the best possible example of it in sport. That’s a massive compliment. It was certainly a very significant passage of play for me, for a number of reasons, least of all that I scored the winning try.

  We were pretty heavy favourites to beat Ireland. Nick Farr-Jones, our captain, had to be substituted very early through injury, and I was given the captain’s armband. We always felt we were in control. But you’ve still got to put teams away. We had most of the play—we even had a couple of tries disallowed for forward passes—but whenever we looked up at the scoreboard, Ireland were still there, lurking just behind us. We couldn’t seem to pull away from them and put the game beyond doubt.

  An enduring memory for me, as goal-kicker, was how incredibly quiet the stadium was whenever I prepared to kick. When you’re playing suburban club rugby in Brisbane, for example, there might only be four hundred people there. But they’d be only a metre away. You’d hear every little comment and there was always somebody saying something—‘Jeez, this is a hard kick, mate. I don’t think you’re going to get this.’ That didn’t get to me at all. But in Dublin, the deathly silence unnerved me because it reminded me not only that I was kicking for vital points, but also that sixty thousand people were there at the ground and were all intently watching me.

  We kept nudging ahead in the game, doing just enough, until a little mistake somewhere in defence when we were recovering a kick-through allowed the Irish flanker Gordon Hamilton to go over in the corner with four minutes left. Even as a player on the opposing side, I couldn’t help but register the potential romance of the situation. It was absolute mayhem. Lansdowne Road went berserk. Ireland led us 16–15. There was literally a pitch invasion. Before Ralph Keyes kicked the conversion from the sideline to make it 18–15, I thought, ‘Okay, I’m the captain. What are we going to do?’

  My next thought w
as, ‘Let’s deal in certainties.’ So I went to the referee, Jim Fleming, and asked him how long there was to go. He said, ‘Four minutes.’ When I got back to the goal line the guys were standing there, heads down, going, ‘We’re gone.’

  I disagreed. I thought, ‘There’s time.’ I didn’t want to deal in negatives. How often do you hear people use the word ‘don’t’ in a tense situation? ‘Don’t do this; don’t panic; don’t worry.’ It’s not a good word. So instead I said to the guys, ‘We’ve got four minutes; this is what we’re going to do.’

  I decided that we’d kick off long and then they’d kick for touch and that would give us a lineout in their half. We’d win the ball and then we, the backs, would look after it from there. I knew the outcome I wanted. I set small step-by-step goals. I said, ‘If you end up with the ball and are in any doubt, hold on to it and just keep going forward.’

  We kicked off long and their halfback, Rob Saunders, sliced his kick badly. We ended up with a lineout inside their twenty-two. We were already ahead of the game plan.

  We’d done a move, called ‘S’, a few times during the game, where I’d get the ball from a lineout and pass to Timmy Horan, then he’d start to go across field with his centre partner, Jason Little, almost toward the corner flag. Then Campo would come from the open side and cut back late and counter-intuitively go inside, beating the defence, we hoped. I decided to call the ‘S’ move. There were two reasons for doing that. One, we’d been successful with it throughout the game. Two, if Campo got caught, at least he’d be near the forwards instead of being wide out on his own. I wanted to make absolutely sure we secured the ball. Without it, the game was over.

  TIM HORAN: Michael was a much better running flyhalf than he was given credit for and he had amazing awareness. He was quicker than you thought too, but—more importantly—he knew exactly when to run, where to run and when to pass. As his inside centre, you didn’t even have to worry about his pass. You just ran for the gap and you just knew that the ball would be there.