It has been an interesting first week. The key issue for me is the increasing importance of the mental side of the game. For any coach with the courage to take it on, mental performance is the next real source of advantage, one rugby people have tended to dodge.

You say to a player he should work on passing off his left side and he says no problem. You sit down with him and tell him he needs to work on his mental skills and he thinks he's a nut. He thinks you are saying he's weak.

We saw France, Ireland and Italy not perform the way they should have in the opening matches. Their performance levels have nothing to do with motivation or overtraining.

If you look at the week France had in the build-up to that first match against Argentina, the players were clearly coming under huge pressure.

The French have a coach who is heading into a political career after the World Cup. They had Zinedine Zidane, the captain of the winning French World Cup team, in their camp and they had the president of the country, Nicolas Sarkozy, saying he wanted the team to win for his presidency. All of this placed pressure on the players and distracted them.

The physical and mental intimidation of Italy was apparent before their game against New Zealand. When the New Zealanders were doing the haka, Italy formed a huddle away from them and treated the whole thing as if it were not happening. They pretended it was not there. It was and they were thinking about it.

The only verbal and mental abuse allowed by the laws of rugby is the haka. It comes under the guise of culture but, make no mistake, New Zealand use it as intimidation of their opposition.

The Australians get around it by singing Humpty Dumpty to the rhythm and cadence of the words whenever they play New Zealand. It goes "Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall" in time with the words and movements of the Kiwis. Sometimes you can see the Aussie players laughing.

But doing that takes the pressure off. It turns it into something funny rather than something intimidating.

Partly it has to do with playing against each other so often but the haka now means absolutely nothing to the Australians, while the Italians were 38 points down after 18 minutes.

Dave Alred, the former kicking coach for England, had a title. He was the "mental-skills coach", but he never used that title because the culture in rugby has trouble with accepting that aspect of the game.

The job of coaching a team is to create an environment where the individual and the team can perform skills at or above 90 per cent of maximum. Italy could not, France could not and Ireland could not.

At the end of the day all three teams fell into "try harder syndrome". The harder they tried, the worse it got.

Argentina succeeded because despite intimidation from the home crowd they were striving for recognition as a top rugby-playing nation.

They played for acceptance into the Six Nations.

They played a simple game and they were empowered by their coach to do that.

They played to almost 100 per cent of their ability, while the French were inhibited and played to about 60 per cent of their ability.

It happens in all sports all through history. Look at Stan Smith in the 1971 Wimbledon final. It is two sets all against John Newcombe. He is serving for the match and he's thinking of not forgetting to thank his parents in his speech afterwards. He loses.

Gavin Hastings in the 1991 World Cup semi-final against England has a kick in front of the posts to get Scotland into the final. It's an easy kick. But he misses and Scotland go out.

Teams and individuals not performing is nothing new. New Zealand are physically and mentally the best team at this year's World Cup, yet the label they carry in the competition is that of the choker. At World Cups they are chokers.

They haven't won the World Cup since the first year, all of 20 years ago, and now they are dreading playing Australia in the semi-finals. Everyone knows it.

Obviously its not a physical problem, but mental problems manifest themselves as physical problems.

Scots hanging by a string

Scotland now have a huge dilemma and will come under huge pressure, firstly, to make the right decision. Do they pick their best team when they face New Zealand and try to keep the match to a reasonable score? Or do they put out a second string and save the frontline players for the pivotal match against Italy six days later?

If they put out too weak a side against New Zealand, the Kiwis could run up a cricket score of maybe 80 points and then the Italians might have a better points differential. They have to carefully think about what they are going to do.

I also think they are going to get both barrels from New Zealand. Graham Henry will field his strongest team against the Scots. Six days after the game New Zealand play Romania, where they will put out their second-string team and win comfortably.

On that cycle it would give New Zealand's top players a 13-day break going into the quarter-finals.