Owen Farrell has expressed his intention to adopt a more carefree approach to goal-kicking, reminiscent of a child playing around, in order to free himself from the mental burden that adversely affected his accuracy in the Six Nations Championship.
During the championship, the England captain’s success rate in kicking dropped to a mere 47% after three rounds, but increased to 58% after he kicked three penalties and a conversion against Ireland.
This decline began after the loss to South Africa in the previous autumn, following three consecutive games with a 100% success rate.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Farrell said: “There’s always bits to pick up on but the thing that I want to take it back to is enjoy being out there and enjoy kicking balls over the posts, trying to see how well I can strike them and almost taking it back to being back as a kid messing around,
“I’ve done enough technical work over the course of my career and that’s not to say at all I don’t want to be better. I do. But I don’t want to bog myself down and get in my own way as well, which probably a lot of what I’ve been doing I feel has been the case.”
Farrell’s subpar performance in the kicking return during the win over Wales, where he only successfully made two out of six attempts, suggests that his efforts to rectify his technique had backfired and worsened his mental state.
He added: “Sometimes the more you think about something, the more it becomes a problem,
“And sometimes you think you have a fix and then you think that into a problem. Against Wales I hit one that was good, and then I hit another one that was good but it missed.
“After that I tried to pull back, pull back and pull back and that’s because I was trying to think my way through it rather than try to hit the ball as well as I can. Getting out my own way feels like it is key at the minute.”
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#1. Dave Attwood
“So whenever we play each other there is always some element in the game where one of us is running at the other one or we are trying to bang each other. There always seems to be an element of that to it. I am sure he is like, I don’t even know that Dave is playing.”