Jonny Wilkinson Knihy

In this fully updated paperback edition of the Sunday Times bestseller, Jonny Wilkinson opens up to reveal what it is like to be the world's most famous rugby player and an international sporting superstar. MY WORLD is a fascinating insight into his motivations, thoughts, hopes and fears as he discusses topics as far ranging as playing for England, his all-time heroes, becoming a celebrity, what it is like to be on the pitch with the hopes of a nation resting on your shoulders and in your feet and the positives that could be taken from the 2005 Lions Tour. For the first time, Jonny Wilkinson talks openly about the England World Cup campaign and the pressure he was under in those dramatic final moments when he won the cup for his country. Two years on he also reveals the battles he has had to face to bring himself back to full fitness as England build their team round him in preparation for the 2007 World Cup.

Jonny Wilkinson's career has crossed three decades and four World Cups. He has accumulated phenomenal achievements, world points records, an impressive list of broken body parts, and a drop goal that will be remembered forever. But the peculiar calmness with which he played the game masked a very different reality. In Jonny, he reveals the extraordinary psychology that he had to tame in order to be able to dominate his sport. For most of his life, he was driven by a quest for perfection and an obsession to be the best player in the world; here he shows how these two facets of his competitive mind took such a hold of him that they sent him to the top of the world, then swept him up and dragged him down in a spiral of despair. Jonny's career has spanned the far reaches: amazing high and iconic moments, then a fight against injury that culminated in a battle with depression. Here he tells of the physical toll he knew his body was taking from rugby, even from his youth; he tells of how he never wanted to be a kicking fly-half but learnt to adapt his natural game to play the style that Clive Woodward believed necessary to win a World Cup, and how he nearly walked out on Martin Johnson's England team 13 years later. Jonny is the unrelenting, brutally honest account of one of the most revered, successful and complex athletes ever to play rugby for England."