Kicking is a whole new ball game

Perhaps the surprise is not so much that England are losing at the moment, it's the way they're losing. We've been accustomed to Jonny Wilkinson slotting everything between the big H for so long that it has become a given England will score most of their points in multiples of three.

The biggest reason for that is Dave Alred MBE, the world's leading kicking coach. He was recently inaugurated into the UK Coaching Hall of Fame and in the 2004 New Year's honours list.

Alred's work is in part technical: he is credited with improving the techniques of Neil Jenkins, Matt Burke and Charlie Hodgson (the latter might need a little more work). He has worked with football goalkeepers, the Minnesota Vikings in the NFL and Dublin's Gaelic football side.

But if Da Vinci had Lisa and her enigmatic smile, Alred has Wilkinson and his ball-tilted-off-axis, sitting-on-the-loo technique. Since then, many kickers, most notably (though nowhere near as successfully) Carlos Spencer, have begun tilting the ball off its axis to negate the natural right-to-left draw a right-footed kicker will get.

More recently Alred has concentrated on the mental side of kicking. When Wilkinson was going through a (brief) period of struggle, Alred got him thinking about 'Doris'. Who's Doris? She was the imaginary woman sitting 20 rows back in direct line with where Wilkinson needed to kick the ball to clear the posts. Alred had Wilkinson imagining he was kicking the ball into Doris' lap.

Recently Alred, a PhD student, said: "The most fundamental change over the last two years has been looking at mental preparation; trying to ensure players always perform at or near their potential. If there's anything I can do to get a player to go where he's never been before, in terms of performance level, that's my job."

- HERALD ON SUNDAY