Jonny we hardly know ya!

HE may be just 24, with rugby talent to burn but it appears that England out-half Jonny Wilkinson is having his game strangled by a weight of expectation that could derail him.

And for once it's neither the media nor supporters who are putting the squeeze on Jonny. Every ounce of pressure which has sapped the smile from his face ahead of Sunday's World Cup semi-final has been self-inflicted, thanks to a seemingly unrelenting bout of introspection.

Wilkinson's tournament to date hasn't gone exactly the way he wanted it to and for a player who would appear to spend more time than his team-mates thinking about the game, that's proved to be an almost wholly unhealthy exercises. The more he analyses his own game and the admittedly minor cracks that have appeared over the past month, the more pressure he heaps upon his own shoulders.

Speaking to the assembled press yesterday, Wilkinson conveyed the words of a man who's desperately searching for some explanation for his poor run of form over the past month. Almost every answer the tired looking out-half gave contained references to analysing his performances on video or of trawling through his memory bank to think how he could have "directed his efforts in a better way."

He's clearly not a happy camper. "I just want to put the effort in and just try to make the right decisions," said Wilkinson of putting his game back on track. "I'm still looking at video tapes and keeping in tune with my memories of games and knowing I could have done things differently. I wouldn't say I have a corner to turn nor would I say I'm playing well. It's somewhere in between."

Wilkinson then recalled his missed kicks in the tournament in graphic detail. Most pundits would have struggled to remember most of those wayward attempts (which have had no huge effect on England's games anyway) but the guilty party appears to carry them on his mind as some kind of sick punishment.

Even that most notorious of knocker the English journalist appears to have backed off Wilkinson over the past few days. They've almost gone the full circle from criticism to pity in the past few weeks, with one member of the press-corps even suggesting to Wilkinson yesterday that maybe he was putting too much pressure on himself.

The out-half's response to the prompting could hardly have convinced anyone that he's anything other than tormented heading into Sunday's game. You get the feeling that if Wilkinson was a businessman in a suit, he'd suffer a nervous breakdown by the time he was 30.

"I can only maintain that's how I behave as a person naturally," said the player of the pressure he puts on himself. "I like to try and give my best, I think it's my duty to try and make the best of the time I've got as a rugby player and to be grateful for being here and being in this position. There is pressure, it's pressure I put on myself but I would put the same pressure on myself if I was in another profession."

Wilkinson's keenness to try and explain his form of late has even seen the player latching onto any theory of supposed weakness. His coach, Clive Woodward, suggested earlier this week that Wilkinson may spend too much time competing for the ball at ruck-time, and the Newcastle player was almost jumping out of his seat to agree.

"I think, undoubtedly I do spend a bit too much time in those rucks but it's an immediate reaction to what you see in front of you. I'm hoping, I'm trying to get better at assessing when I'm really needed in there or when I should leave it to the real wing-forwards to do that job. That's all part of the learning process for me. But sometimes you watch the video afterwards and say on reflection, 'maybe I shouldn't have gone in.'"

Reflection appears to take up a huge amount of Wilkinson's time. When he's not training with the rest of the squad, he's usually doing some kicking training of his own, and if he's not pinging the ball over from every position on the pitch, he's most probably thinking about it or what's going wrong in his game. It's probably not a totally fair statement to make, but you do really have to wonder if the out-half is taking this rugby lark far too seriously.

Very little is known about the player's private life, and while that's not an indictment in itself, there's a strong sense that the reason nobody knows anything is because there's absolutely nothing to know. Possibly the greatest insight into Wilkinson's life came in an interview last year, when the out-half admitted that he popped out for an hour of kicking practice in his back garden, just minutes after finishing his Christmas dinner with his family.

The French must be rubbing their hands at all this. While Wilkinson has not yet cracked, he's visibly rattled and Woodward's biggest job in the lead-up to the semi-final must be to get his most key man to relax. But how the coach does it is anyone's guess. Perhaps the brightest solution came from one wag yesterday, who suggested that all Wilkinson needed was a few beers and a pretty women. God knows, it's certainly helped many a rugby player to perform before.