Paris rawly waking; an extended, strike-busting walk to meet friend, colleague, photographer Marc Aspland; a snarl and a gripe round the périphérique; into the Stade de France as the first rays of sun struck the roof, there to view a man who has never stopped working in his life. Wouldn’t know how. His body has been on strike, but never his mind, nor his sportsman’s soul.

Down at pitchside, the sound itself is remarkable enough — a great hollow crump like the beating of a big drum, a single, throbbing strike. Jonny Wilkinson was at practice: hush, hush, whisper who dares. He and his practice partner, Toby Flood, exchanged arcing kicks, united in purpose, 60 yards apart. A nonchalant catch, every time, as if it were the easiest thing in the world, and then another thunderous kick from hand. Neither man had to move more than a step or two to make the catch; how can any one be so stunningly precise?

The answer is in the question: natural talents plus practice, obviously. But how can you be that accurate in the hurly-burly of a game? That’s a mystery no one can answer.

Four years on and it all depends on Wilkinson. Again. The World Cup final. Again. So practice: the left toe almost balletically pointed in the follow-through, the standing foot leaving the ground in an almost imperceptible hop. Honing a single small skill to a point as near to perfection as you can make it — that is not a small thing. And it is the sort of thing that seizes Wilkinson’s imagination.

Wilkinson seeks perfection and will give all he has in the doomed struggle to achieve it. He is a man defined by commitment and this vision of his practice at kicking from hand was the smallest revelation of that definition.

You see his commitment most clearly in the tackle, in the heat of battle. It seems genuinely incongruous, for there is a gentleness about Wilkinson that has touched a nation’s heart. But his tackling is not gentle. It is ferocious, but it comes without hate. He operates an utterly disinterested violence. Small comfort for the tacklee, of course.

Wilkinson hurls himself into the tackle like a gut-seeking missile. It is his nature; not to hurt but to be committed. Commitment is all the go these days. All top athletes talk about their commitment. But there are degrees of commitment and when it comes to commitment Wilkinson is the full pig. That is the Navratilova Principle: the great Martina explained that the difference between herself and lesser tennis players was that where they were involved, she was committed. “It’s like ham and eggs. The chicken’s involved. But the pig’s committed.”

Wilkinson is the Newcastle Old Spot of English sport: the porcus porcorum.

So now they were on to restarts, Wilkinson drop-kicking from the halfway line, looking first for the ten-yarder with maximum hang-time. Get the foot under the ball and lift it; a grotesque body-shape; head low as possible, ball sweeping up and narrowly missing the nose. Then the longer restart — the shallower kick to the 22; a different trajectory, lower, flatter, just as precise. Get it right, get it perfect.

Flood was alongside him doing the same thing towards the opposite wing, and then they swapped. This is a strange intimacy: Flood and Wilkinson are rivals and partners. Both men are playing for the same place in the team, both need each other’s support, each has a vested interest in the other’s misfortune. Goalkeepers in football know the same thing, as do wicketkeepers in cricket. Specialisation in a team sport breeds a strange isolation and Wilkinson’s isolation is a poignant thing.

You felt that in the immense spaces of the Stade de France — the empty seats, the silence, the changed acoustic, the echoing booom! of ball against boot, especially at this unaccustomed sporting hour, when most supporters here in Paris were looking at pains au chocolat with the loathing of the truly overdined.

But Wilkinson was kicking with the sober commitment that is as much a part of him as his knowledge of the ecstasies of victory. The open session was closing: time to move out, even as Wilkinson was beginning to do that most Jonny-esque of things. Now to kick the ball from the tee. “C’est fini! You must leave,” the steward told us, adding, charmingly: “Huis clos! Time to go!”

So Wilkinson placed the ball on the tee. Walked backwards — but you know all this as well as I do, as well as he does. The few lateral strides to the right. And then the pose: hands clasped, bum stuck out, knees bent. Look at ball. Look, long, hard at target. Look at ball and . . . Well, as I said, you know what happens next. Or should do.

Wilkinson is at a rather modest 60.7 per cent accuracy when kicking from the tee at this World Cup. But hell, when it matters — when it really matters — well, when it came to that last penalty, not to mention that dropped goal against France last Saturday, I knew it was going over and so did the rest of the world. Wilkinson, the when-it-matters man.

That’s an aspect of commitment that is the opposite of arrogance. The arrogant athlete assumes that he is better than everyone else and cannot cope when this simple world view is proved wrong. The anxious player seems constantly to improve but is hagridden by fear.

But Wilkinson’s extraordinary level of commitment has taken him beyond arrogance and fear, so much so that he confessed, in these pages, that he really cannot — and if he can’t, no one can — blank out all the bad thoughts, as athletes routinely claim.

Wilkinson takes big kicks knowing that a crazy glory awaits him if he succeeds, knowing that if he fails he has failed everybody.

He has taken these dreadful emotions and somehow convinced them to work on his side. And after four years during which he required a commitment beyond the imagining, still less the reach of most of us as he wrestled with one injury, one illness after another, he is back. It was commitment that got him playing again and now, back playing, he carries the hopes of a nation. Committed? Overcommitted? But that’s what he does best.

And booom! as the ball explodes off the boot again. We shuffled away, leaving Wilkinson in his huis clos, in the private accès interdit room of himself, bum stuck out, hands clasping, looking from ball to target and back again. I turned my back to make my exit. Booom! Hope and the man who carries the burden of hope.