He's back...

The last time I saw Jonny Wilkinson live was in 2003, round about the same time (he says casually) I flew to Sydney for a weekend to see England win the World Cup. It was a perfect, fairytale ending to a story which, it seemed at the time, could never be beaten.

Today I saw him again, and it was.

In 2003 the Jonny story was about the phenomenal, inexorable rise of a rugby machine. One of the greatest tacklers for his size ever, and the greatest kicker, he was the enforcer who routinely punished opposition defences as they tried to resist England's forward strength. His kick to win the final felt like poetry. Or at least to an Englishman who'd lived in Australia through successive Ashes thumpings, poetic justice. All those years of underachievement, of promise, of talk - always talk - of slatings in the press, of being taunted by opposition fans from Scotland to Sydney, all seemed to be banished in one perfectly choereographed drop goal which sliced through the wet Sydney night and changed the way we saw English sport.

But today was quite different, and far greater testimony to the real power of sport. Most people assumed Jonny could never play again, me included. In the intervening years he has injured both knees, his back, his kidney, his feet, his neck, and if I remember correctly, his bicep. I think he threw in a hernia operation for good measure too. Simon Barnes - the greatest sports writer in the world - wondered aloud if he was cursed. It seemed surely he must be, for time and again he returned, only for his frail body to be spat out of club rugby, mangled again in new and inventive ways. (I mean, how DO you lacerate a kidney?) Lesser men would have acquiesced in the face of such implacable fate.

But that is not his way. Today he ran the game as though he'd never been away. But never once did his body language say that this was about him, that this was his moment of payback for 3 long years of misery. He was the quintessential team man in everything he did. And at the end he ran off with the captain as though he was simply a number, another cog in a machine. No theatrical acknolwedgment of the 80,000 crowd, who all stood to applaud.

He is the truly dedicated professional who will not give up and who will not settle for second best. The Australians churn out sportsmen like these for fun. But for once, he is English. Today's performance spoke far more of the man than 2003. And today's performance should speak far more to the rest of us, too.

For he must have felt doubt during those 3 years, he must have tired of the excruciating cycle of rehabilitation, the long roads back to fitness, the questions from the press, the doubt, then the same ruined comebacks. But more darkly he must have wondered that the thing which he dedicated himself to so utterly was to be taken from his grasp at the peak of his powers, like Barnes' Greek tragedy.

For someone who worked so tirelessly to eradicate the flaws from his game, to control the pressure situations through his own efforts, he must have begun to doubt himself, and realised that fate was his master after all. And at that point surely he must have felt like giving up? No one would have blamed him after so long fighting.

But - and this is the simple lesson - he never did give up. And today the world saw what sometimes happens if you refuse to accept the cards that fate hands you.