Even cushions at home have to be in right order, insists obsessive Ford

Ford cannot leave home without his bed made to perfection. Yes, he can laugh at his obsessive tidiness, but, he concedes, that does not mean he could veer from his precise, never-to-be-messed-with scatter-cushion formation.

Question: “George, is there anything you are laid-back about?” Answer: “If you ask most people, they’d say: ‘No, not really.’ No, I wouldn’t say there was.”

More on scatter cushions, crockery positioning and clean homes later, although it is all related to a tidy mind and as England push deeper into the RBS Six Nations Championship next week, with Wales, France and a grand slam looming larger, you wonder how the quest for perfection rests with him.

For a start, he does not let up at all in a training session. He has a simple view: he has to come out of every session better than when he started.

“There are a lot of people whosaythey want to get better every session,” he says, “but to actually do it is a different matter. I put pressure on myself to try to do that.”

Wilkinson’s presence has fed the obsession. He has been training with Ford and Owen Farrell, his kicking partner, twice a week and Ford now not only trains like Wilkinson but he talks like him too.

“As a kicker, you wake up each day and you have to start all over again,” he says. Kicking as an existential challenge — that sentence is pure Jonny. As is Ford’s conviction that it matters less where the ball goes than understanding why it has gone there.

Farrell and Ford now start the week without kicking too much at the posts. This is driven by Wilkinson. Instead, they will kick up and down the five-metre channel, maybe a trifle dull for anyone not competing at Twickenham next Saturday, but they agree it helps to focus on the method rather than the outcome.

“If you kick it through the posts and it goes a little left, you don’t think much of it because it’s gone over,” Ford explains. “If it goes to the left down the five-metre channel, you understand straightaway what you’ve done, and to the right likewise.”

Ford is relishing this: the process of preparation. For what it is worth, he does not appear to mind that, for all this preparation, it will most likely be Farrell taking the kicking duties against Wales.

Ford, lefft, finds the funny side of a team talk with Dan Cole, middle, and Elliot Daly but his easygoing persona masks a desire for perfection in a chaotic sport

SWNS

That is because — again, very Wilkinsonesque — he cannot get peace of mind for what might happen in a game until he has fully prepared before it.

Nevertheless, despite their clear similarities, Ford may be psychologically better equipped than was his metronomic Svengali. Nothing ate into Wilkinson’s mind like a poor kicking session, but although Ford strives for perfection, he is better able to walk away when he does not quite get it right.

“I wouldn’t be out there kicking for hours,” he explains. He has taught himself to live with a miss “because in games you don’t get a chance to have another kick. Even with things in life, away from rugby, I’ve always been quite tidy and organised. I wouldn’t say I get stressed or panicked if things are not, but I like to get them straight. When I was at school, I always wanted to do my homework when I got home straightaway. I had to do it there and then. I wanted it over and done with. Then I could plan everything and move on and not have to worry about what I hadn’t done.”

His elder brother Joe, who plays for Sale Sharks, was never as meticulously prepared. As a kid, George would be sitting at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for training or school, always ready early; Joe would be last minute, tie undone. When he and Farrell were at school together, Ford was so well organised that he would do his homework and then help Farrell with his so they could go out and kick a ball together.

This perfectionist’s mind, he says, comes from his mother, Sallyanne. “You can’t sit on the sofa at home and move any of the cushions,” he says. “You have to have them in the right spot.” And he agrees that this is absolutely as it should be.

The scatter-cushion formation on his bed, he says, he takes from his mother too. For the record, this is how they sit: two grey ones in the middle, then two whites either side and two more smaller grey cushions on each wing. They lie quite flat, he says, like the England back division. Living in this world of compulsive bed preparation, he acknowledges, “is a nightmare but something that has to be done every morning”. It clearly doesn’t help that his lodger, Dan Bowden, the Bath and New Zealand utility back, can sometimes err and leave a cereal bowl in the living room or, even worse, put the crockery in the wrong place. When Ford goes home, after a period of intensive England duty, he doesn’t put his feet up; the first thing he does is tidy up and sort out the crockery.

Ford was giving this interview at a rugby club just outside Bath, as an ambassador for NatWest RugbyForce. After the interview, he was to return home for the first time in a few days to see what state Bowden had left it in.

When your mind works like that, with an order to everything, rugby must be challenge because rugby is a game of chaos. Conversely, the fly half’s job is to give some order to the chaos. Ford must love the patterns the back division work. He certainly loves the process of opening up an opposition attack, especially the way Eddie Jones, the England head coach, wants him to play — as flat as his scatter cushions.

“It is the way I enjoy playing the game,” Ford says. “I want the ball in my hands, attacking the line and being a threat myself.”

If he gets anywhere close to the perfectionist’s ideal next weekend, then that is what we will see. The struggle for Ford, like Wilkinson, is that in rugby, perfection only ever remains an ideal.

England players George Ford, Elliot Daly and Dan Cole were appearing at Oldfield Old Boys RFC, Bath, as representatives of the NatWest RugbyForce initiative. More on englandrugby.com/natwestrugbyforce