Now I feel my serve is a much better shot technically but I also have a

Now I feel my serve is a much better shot, technically, but I also have a different mindset: I’m going after it so much more. And I think that’s the combination that can win me Wimbledon.”In this day and age you’ve got to serve big, and I think I’m in a position to do that, because my serve’s much more consistent. I look forward to seeing how much it’s improved over the last 12 months.”Conversely, players return better nowadays “Yes. There’s all this talk about the technology and how it’s speeded up the game. If you give [Mark] Philippoussis a wooden racket, he’ll still serve pretty much just as hard. But on the return of serve, if you have a wooden racket, you have to hit it right in the middle, otherwise the ball will just roll off your racket and on the floor.

Now, with the big-headed rackets, if guys are getting their racket on the ball it’s coming back with interest. That’s part of the evolution of the game.”I think that grass court tennis has changed. Before, it used to be about who was going to serve the most aces. The court’s bouncing a lot higher, the balls are heavier and a lot slower, so you’ve got to be able to adapt a lot.

He missed a couple of tackles in horribly public circumstances, and set his struggling countrymen even further back on their heels by overcooking some of his tactical punts. But playing the All Blacks in Dunedin doesn’t have much in common with sticking 100-plus points on the Romanians. It’s not really the same game, is it? Sometimes, you have to accept the reality of a situation, roll up your sleeves and make the best of it.”Hodgson went some way towards doing just that at Carisbrook. Unfortunately, I put in a couple of bad ones in Dunedin, and they didn’t help our cause. Against a side as good as this lot, everything has to be right – and I mean everything.”Did I yearn for the opportunity to show what I could do? Of course I did. Having a player as good as him breathing down your neck makes life difficult, to say the least; if you’re not winning the collisions and the ball you’re receiving is scruffy, it tends to be a long match for someone in my position.”Under such circumstances, it is the outside-half’s job to influence things with his kicking game.

“The pace was far quicker than anything I’d experienced [Hodgson's previous Test starts at outside-half had been against Romania at Twickenham in 2001 (winning margin: 134 points) and the Pumas in Buenos Aires the following year] and, to be honest, it was more physical, too.”Richie McCaw, the New Zealand flanker, was in my face for an awful lot of the game and allowed me very little space in which to manoeuvre. It is time he crossed the line separating promise from achievement.”It took me a while to get into the game last week,” he admitted. Even when the New Zealanders mess up, as they did in their World Cup semi-final defeat by the Wallabies in Sydney last November, he backs himself and his trickery.Hodgson, less extravagant by nature but no less ingenious with ball in hand, has yet to cast off his inhibitions – he possesses the vision thing, but has offered precious few glimpses of it while wearing the white of his country The apprenticeship cannot last forever. You can’t help wondering what’s coming when he has that expression on his face.”King Carlos, as the Aucklanders christened him when he scored 33 points on his international debut against Argentina in 1997, is without question the most cocksure character in the All Black party. There were times last week when I caught his eye, and realised he was smiling at me It was pretty unnerving, that smile.