Letter:Essential passion

Sir: Tony Underwood writes (6 Feb) that in striving to avoid conceding penalties at Twickenham on Saturday, all the passion went out of the French play.

Passion is good box office material but it can easily get out of control. McEnroe could never play his best without "raging for perfection". Passion in golf and snooker is less easily accommodated but Ballesteros and Alex Higgins expressed it in their play. The cool clinicians of sporting excellence such as Steve Davis, Nick Faldo, Bjorn Borg and Gary Lineker must be chemically different.

Give Paul Gascoigne or Eric Cantona an anti-passion pill and they probably couldn't play at all.

Yours, ALAN RADERMACHER Barnes, Surrey