Rugby Place Kicking

Place kicking is an area where visualisation and ritual can play a huge part in success. They are necessary because these are the occasions when the player has time to think about what he’s doing, which makes it more difficult to act instinctively.

When an action is so grooved that it becomes routine, it indicates that the subconscious brain, and the cerebellum in particular, has taken control. If, however, the conscious brain takes over, which is especially likely to happen on important kicks, performance is likely to deteriorate. Rituals, such as crouching, or tapping the feet, keep conscious thoughts at bay, and allow the player to follow a pre-set routine.

Many successful kickers visualise the whole process before executing it. The same patterns of the brain are stimulated when visualisation is used as when the actual activity is performed. So visualisation seems to prime neural circuits, and this also helps to exclude the conscious, analytical parts of the brain from the execution.

When Johnny Wilkinson was taking kicks for England, he’d imagine that there was a lady called Doris whom he could see through the posts sitting in the crowd. I think at one time he imagined she was reading a newspaper. Then he imagined she was holding a drink which he would try and knock out of her hand. He would then have an imaginary line, like an imaginary wire, the ball would follow on its way through the posts to Doris.

I’ve always assumed that the best kickers would focus on a particular part of the ball with which they would aim to make contact, rather than just focusing generally on the ball. I’d not seen any evidence for this, until I read a recent quote from Dave Alder, the Wasps fly half: “I was once practising with a set of six (balls) and something didn’t feel right about one of them. It was only after I’d been kicking for a while that I realised the logo on the ball had been printed upside down”.

If you could get a ball marked up with lots of different sectors, it would help those learning to kick to discover which parts of the ball they should be focusing on in order to execute the desired type of kick.

David Donner