Someone really has to tell Jonny Wilkinson that although he will be playing in a semi-final of the World Cup next Sunday, rugby is actually a game to be enjoyed.

And if he wants to know what that means, he could do no better than follow the example set by Mike Catt, who spent the second half of last night's quarter-final helping to unlock the creative energy walled up within the world's best number 10.

The look on Wilkinson's face as the teams lined up for the anthems belonged to a man haunted by the fear of failing to live up to his own standards. That fraught expression was still in place at the end of a wonderful match, even though he had scored 23 of England's 28 points and had just closed out the evening with a long-range drop-goal in injury time.

Wilkinson is a perfectionist, which can be an agonisingly heavy burden to bear. He blames himself for everything that goes wrong. But that exaggerated sense of responsibility, so impressive in a raw teenager, has become a corrosive factor in the 24-year-old man, undermining the spontaneous expression of his gifts, and such was the poor state of England's game at half-time against Wales that Clive Woodward found it necessary to give him some help.

When Catt arrived at the start of the second half, sent on to act as an auxiliary outhalf, it was possible to make an instructive comparison. Aged 32, Catt is in his third World Cup. Injuries have cost him a lot of playing time in recent seasons, and he came to Australia with no expectation of a starting place. As a result, he was able to perform last night in a way that eased the side's nerves.

Watching the first half, he said, had given him an advantage.

"Jonny worked exceptionally hard throughout the game," he said. "You watch that first half and you'll see that he did a hell of a lot. It's a lot easier for me to sit on the sidelines and see how the game is unfolding. It's very, very hard to do that on the actual pitch."

England's tactics had been as defective as their technical skills in that first half. Wilkinson himself began by smacking a straightforward penalty kick against the upright in the second minute before missing with a drop-goal attempt.

Half an hour later, after he had slotted his second penalty attempt, he failed to gather Ben Kay's low pass - a typical moment in a half which also featured unforced handling errors from Dan Luger and Will Greenwood.

It took the arrival of Catt, and the electrifying 60-metre dash with which Jason Robinson created England's only try, to get the team back on the rails, and even then there was more bloody-mindedness (to use Woodward's phrase) than planning involved in the comeback.

Catt said he had received no specific instructions: "Just to go on and play like I have the last couple of times I've been involved. We'd played a lot of the game in our own half and we wanted to take some of the pressure off the forwards by getting it into their half. We did that effectively and caused a few mistakes down there and got the points."

Were he to help his team through to an even bigger victory next weekend, it would perhaps assuage some of the pain lingering from his previous semi-final, in 1995, when Jonah Lomu used him as a doormat for the first of the tries with which New Zealand crushed England.

"I've got no pressure on me at the moment and I'm thoroughly enjoying myself," Catt said.

When Catt was England's first-choice outhalf, during Jack Rowell's tenure, nerves often got in the way of his natural adventurousness. His long, looped miss-passes were ripe for interception and his inconsistency was infuriating. Now, however, his maturity enables him to switch roles with Wilkinson when necessary, giving England a greater variety of angle and tempo in their assaults on the opposition's line.

Under Catt's influence, Wilkinson regained some of his composure yesterday. He made one dazzling solo break on the hour, his touch kicking regained its accuracy, and the final statistics showed he had landed six of his seven penalties and his only conversion attempt. But if only he could find a way to enjoy himself while winning rugby matches, instead of treating the World Cup as an ordeal, then perhaps he might show us the real Jonny Wilkinson again.