Johnny Watching in Wycombe

Every mother's dream
By Loose Head
October 6 2004

It’s a near sell-out this weekend. Quite astounding really. Newcastle don’t normally have much of a travelling support and Wasps’ season ticket holders are something like 5K. So where do the others come from? Well, the most hyped English rugby player ever is coming to our humble home this weekend.

How did Wilko get to be at this mythical level of adoration? I must admit to not thinking that anyone is worth this near Beckham-esque treatment, but that’s the cult of the celebrity for you. You could blame it on the media I suppose but that’s too easy

If people are lame enough to lap up a marketing image how can you blame adverts, magazines, newspapers, television programmes and the like for cashing in? The great British public like easy prompts to remember stories: Beckham kicks footballs and is normally very good; Wilkinson kicks rugby balls and is normally very good. Wilkinson owes Ben Kay 25% of all royalties on all merchandising, Boots adverts, book sales and any other source of income he gets (including increases in his rugby earnings). If Ben Kay hadn’t been such a plank and actually caught a pop pass from Dawson - slump he goes over the line, scores a try and England win in normal time. There would have been no drop goal in the dying seconds of injury time to raise Wilko above mere mortals.

If I might digress for a moment. That drop goal, everyone remembers it. Why? Because it was just before lunch on a Saturday on ITV. Everyone was able to see it on normal television. The country is really lifted by a major sporting win. So what happens next? At the first opportunity the next rugby broadcasting contract (HEC) goes to Sky and we are back where we were. Special memo to RFU, ERC, IRB etc etc …People like rugby. They will watch rugby if you let them. You never know, if more people get interested more people will watch games live or even play! Don’t let it all disappear up Sky’s mini-dish so they can try to force people to pay £500 per year to watch any - it doesn’t work like that.

Anyway, back to the hype. What is possibly the most amazing thing about the hype around St Johnny of Wilko is how otherwise sensible rugby people are joining in. Clive Woodward referred to Wilkinson as the best rugby player in the world. That just strikes me as a meaningless phrase. Surely the whole point of rugby is that it is a game for all shapes and sizes. The different roles on the pitch reflect such completely different skill sets to say that the fly half is better than the number eight or a front row strikes me as just a little odd.

Wilko is a very good kicker, but the Aussie kicker in the final kicked under immeasurable pressure. Which one was better? Is Wilko really the best game controlling fly half in the world? Is he even the best general in England? Whenever Alex King has come up against Wilkinson King has always won the contest.

If the crowd this weekend is boosted, as many suspect, because of the attendance of the man with the golden hype [sorry, I meant “boot”] then we can’t complain. The modern world runs of celebrity. With luck, a proportion of the Johnny watchers will look past the aura and see a decent game going on and want to come back again. It won’t be all of them, in the same way as you won’t get all of the people who turned up at Twickenham at the beginning of the season along every week. Showcase people and showcase events draw people along who wouldn’t otherwise come. This is a good thing for the growth of the game.

The problem for Wilko is that he knows that being a household name means that the headline writers have an easy hook to hang the story on, whether that is “Wilkinson succeeds…” or more ominously for him “Wilkinson, the new England captain, failed….”.