He sliced his first touch-kick from close to his own line, a few seconds after the start. Several times later in the game he failed to find touch from straight-forward positions. Twice he kicked the ball out on the full, forcing his team-mates to drag themselves back for a scrum.

With the ball in his hands, he never resembled the sort of outhalf who shapes the game for the runners outside him. But still the prodigious Jonny Wilkinson would not be denied the man of the match award.

Even in the wake of an apparently flawless game, Wilkinson's face wears a self-critical frown. After scoring seven times from seven attempts and notching 20 of England's 25 points against South Africa on Saturday, he emerged from the dressing-room looking even more preoccupied than usual with the imperfections of his own performance.

And yet, two matches into this World Cup, he has still to fail with a kick at the posts. "I'm grateful for the way it's gone so far," he said afterwards, "and I'm glad that it seems the work going in is paying off. It must mean that I'm doing something right, if not everything, in training at the moment. The other side of my kicking game wasn't quite as positive today, so I've got mixed feelings."

England could feel only gratitude that they had Wilkinson and not Louis Koen in their number 10 shirt. Between the 30th and the 36th minutes, with the score at 6-3 to the white shirts, poor Koen missed three consecutive penalties from between 42 and 48 metres. Finally, two minutes from the interval, he plopped one over from the 22. Had Wilkinson been in Koen's place, England might have turned around 15-6 down and, after a largely incoherent 40 minutes, they could have had no grounds for complaint.

"We knew at half-time, and people expressed it in their own way, that we needed to up the levels of precision a bit," Wilkinson said. "We needed to play the game at the other end of the field a bit more. They'd missed a few opportunities to take it above 6-6, but we knew that we hadn't played as we'd like to. The guys were desperate to get back out there and show what else we had. We'd disappointed ourselves a little bit in the first half and put ourselves under a huge amount of pressure, but South Africa played very well and they were perhaps unlucky to go in at six-all."

Although critical of his own performance, the outhalf was unwilling to admit that there were more general worries about England's first-half display.

"I'm not sure that there were any real problems," he said. "It was the start of a big Test match, there was lots of pressure on and a lot of ball got slowed down. We weren't able to move down the field as we'd like. We had to do a lot of defending, and when you do a lot of defending you can get very tired. Going into attack straight away isn't quite as simple."

He was asked if there had been a moment when he thought they might lose. "I don't think you can have that attitude," he replied. "It's a case of reacting minute by minute. At 6-6 we thought, right, what's the next job? We had to hold on and do a lot of defending, and we got through that. Then you attack and try to figure out how you're going to score your points. At half-time there were a few comments and we went out there and hit it hard and got it on the board and went from there."

Corne Krige, the Springbok captain, had heard his opponents "shouting and swearing at each other" and had taken it as a sign of panic. "I don't think it's anything abnormal," Wilkinson said. "We're out there and we're making big decisions, and if things aren't going the way you want, they've got to be changed. That's the way we do it. It's always positive. It's a good way of getting your point across, and the guys do it on the understanding that everything is taken the right way."