The sweatshirt in the stands that fixed Wilkinson's kicking

A training pitch, in the middle of a World Cup build-up. Jonny Wilkinson is lining up place kicks, one after another, and his consistency isn't there.

Dave Alred, who works with him on his kicking, doesn't touch his run-up and doesn't touch his plant foot. He climbs into the stand behind the posts and spreads a sweatshirt across a seat.

The seat becomes a couple: Harry and Doris. Doris hates rugby. Her husband dragged her along. She's sitting on the sweatshirt with her paper open, waiting for the whole thing to be over.

Wilkinson stops aiming at the posts. He aims at Doris.

Then the target gets smaller. Not Doris, her lap. Not her lap, the ice cream she's holding, the one Harry went off to fetch her, and it has to come out without damaging the cone. Not the ice cream, the chocolate flake stuck in the top of it.

The ball still has to go between the posts to reach her. Thirty-five to forty meters, straight in front.

Forty-odd minutes on, he still hadn't missed a kick at goal.

What changed wasn't in his foot

Across those forty minutes nobody touched his technique. Same run-up, same pitch, same ball, same distance.

What changed was what he was looking at.

And that's where the story stops being about rugby.

The gap isn't where you think it is

You know the feeling. At practice you're rolling. Everything comes out on its own, you're reading the game right, and you catch yourself thinking that if you played like this on Saturday, somebody would notice.

Saturday comes around. And you play worse than you know how to play.

The first explanation is always the same one: I choke, it's all in my head. It's a dead end, and there's nothing you can do with it.

Look at where your attention goes instead.

At practice it's on the ball, on the screen, on the movement. There's nowhere else for it to be. No score, nobody grading you, nothing riding on the session.

On Saturday it has extra places to go. The score. Who's watching. What happens if you lose. Where you end up in the standings when the season's done. The guy across from you who looks far too sure of himself.

None of those places is imaginary. Every one of them is real. There are simply more of them than there were on Thursday, and your attention hasn't grown to match.

So what holds it is the size of the thing it has to watch. "Stay focused" can't be checked: you can tell yourself that ten times over and never once know whether it's true. A chocolate flake in an ice cream, you know second by second whether you've still got it.

The day Doris was invented

That's the detail everybody skips, and it may be the only one that matters.

Doris wasn't born on a Saturday. She was born on a training pitch, on a day that settled nothing: nobody was keeping score, and the season didn't hang on a miss. Which left room to choose what to look at.

Come Saturday there's nothing left to choose. The target is already there, or it isn't.

What the Korean archers are checking

Seoul, summer 2016. The South Korean archery team sets up inside the Gocheok Sky Dome, the country's first covered ballpark. Targets at seventy meters, the Olympic distance. Music over the PA, the crowd encouraged to make noise. Across from them, the national team reserves, for a mock competition. A month later they're back, shooting through an actual professional game.

They've been going into ballparks since Beijing 2008, where the racket off the Chinese stands made almost as many headlines back home as the athletes did.

You could read those sessions as being about added noise. It looks more like they ask one question, and only one: does the target hold when everything else is calling for your attention?

An archer who hits at seventy meters under the loudspeakers didn't learn to shoot better that day. He learned what his target is worth once it has competition.

You can ask yours the same question. Not the instruction to stay focused, which can never be checked. Something small enough and sharp enough that at any second you know whether it's still in front of you. The seam on the ball and not the scoreboard. The flake in the ice cream and not the stand.

Between your Thursday and your Saturday your game doesn't move a millimeter: it's your target that moves, unless you picked it on a day when nothing was at stake.