Jonny Wilkinson opens up over mental demons

England’s 2003 Rugby World Cup hero and all-time great flyhalf Jonny Wilkinson has opened up in a telling interview with the Express over mental health issues he dealt with during his illustrious rugby career.

Wilkinson recounts a time at Toulon pre-match where he was locked away in a toliet cubicle moments before kickoff, trying to seek assurance from his kicking coach and psychological guru Dave Alred on the phone.

“I’d shut myself in the cubicle so no one could see what I was doing. You don’t make phone calls from the changing room just before a game. You just don’t,” recalls Wilkinson.

“The team was outside in a huddle waiting for me. I was supposed to be giving the ‘come on we can do this’ speech and I was a shivering wreck in the toilet.

“So I was crouched down phoning Dave. And of course he wasn’t there. Why should he be? So I’m stuck in the cubicle with the phone and I can hear the team manager saying, ‘Where’s Jonny? We’ve got to go out in two minutes’.”

His battles with anxiety threatened to consume him throughout his career as he recalls.

“I had mental health stuff throughout my entire life,” he said. “I had times when I’d be speaking to my family before England games from the team hotel where I was inches away from going to tell the coach I couldn’t play. Make up an excuse not to. That was the state I was in. It was pure panic. Chaos.

I’d be sat in the hotel room trying to watch TV but it was just a light changing colour. I was so anxious because I needed to know everything would go how I wanted it to – 95 per cent of me was trying to live in the future.”

The strikingly bold confessions give insight into the reality of Wilkinson’s life, despite being one of the all-time greats and kicking the drop goal that won a Rugby World Cup, he struggled on a day-to-day basis.

“I had this amazing house in the quiet countryside with a jaccuzi. I had a roof over my head, money, people looking after me – I had everything I could possibly need. I was sat in that jacuzzi and I could not have been less happy,” he says.

Mental health in professional sport is increasingly becoming more acceptable to talk about as the realities of the illness become more understood.

“The nature of sport is that you live constantly between two pillars of judgment – your last game and your next game,” says Wilkinson. “There are thousands of people watching, people writing about you, people stopping you in the street, and it’s easy to use that to reinforce that image of who you are.

Read the full interview at the Express here.