Tommy Martin: Sexton’s volcanic intensity drove success, but captaincy requires backchannel diplomacy
Ireland’s Johnny Sexton leaves the field after being replaced during last Saturday’s Guinness Six Nations match against France in Paris. Sexton’s open displeasure with coach Andy Farrell’s decision to take him off was played out to viewers.
Find someone who looks at you the way Johnny Sexton looks at Andy Farrell as he’s being subbed off with 12 minutes to go in a Six Nations decider. And then run a mile.
In terms of pure technique, it was one of the best things accomplished in a green jersey on Saturday night. Conveying his displeasure at being denied the chance to engineer a late drive for glory, Sexton worked the camera like Humphrey Bogart in his heyday.
First, a glance down the lens to grab the attention. Then, a prolonged headshake. Oh-oh, danger here. A glance to the big screen to see he still has the floor, then another headshake and that killer stare that would chill the soul.
Not since Roy Keane ruined a perfectly good evening’s cabaret at the Saipan Hyatt Regency has an Irish captain got his point across to his coach so effectively, and all without uttering a word.
Ireland’s cantankerous kingpin has long been excused the occasional huff. ‘That’s Johnny!’ they’d say, rolling their eyes like he was the racist dad in a 1970s sitcom. With Johnny you always took the rough with the smooth — like a spoonful of cod liver oil it would do you good in the long run.
Johnny is older now, his powers may be failing but he hangs grimly on.
Farrell, meanwhile, is managing what we in sport like to call ‘a period of transition’, which is the slightly crap bit that comes between two good bits. It is a normal stage in the evolution of any team and is generally temporary, unless you are Everton FC.
So it’s complicated. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think Johnny was subjecting Farrell to what’s known in modern sexual politics as negging. This is the practice of criticising a partner so that they feel worthless and desperate and grateful for your dubious attentions.
Is Johnny negging Andy Farrell? Is he effectively saying that though I may be ancient and bockety, I’m still the best you can hope to do?
Naturally, Farrell played down the Sexton death stare in his post-match press conference. “I don’t think there was any malice in that,” the coach said. “I think he was more disappointed with the stuff that we’d done to be fair. I deserved it, he loves me really, he can be so nice, you never see that side of him.” (The last sentence is totally made up).
But when rugby’s greybeards convened to pick over the bones of Saturday’s defeat, they weren’t so sure.
“I don’t think visually it’s a good thing to have your captain coming off shaking his head the way he did,” said Sexton’s former Leinster and Ireland team-mate Brian O’Driscoll on .
On the same programme, Keith Wood issued his condemnation like a headmaster poised to dispense six of the best.
“You might get away with it as a player, you can’t as a captain,” said Wood, “He has to lead with his body language, he has to lead with his performance, he has to lead with the respect he has for his coach…I understand the frustration but it was a dreadful look.”
It’s important to mention here that for rugby people the captaincy is the stuff of Arthurian legend.
They debate the qualities required endlessly: makes rousing speeches, puts his body on the line, pulled a sword from a stone in the presence of a wizard.
Figures like Willie John McBride, Martin Johnson and Paul O’Connell are revered in mythical terms like axe-wielding Viking warrior kings because of the ability to decide whether to take the points or kick to the corner.
So for the likes of O’Driscoll and Wood, former high chieftains themselves, this shit matters. For O’Driscoll in particular, who soldiered with Sexton for many years, there is the hint of chickens coming home to roost.
Though the pair are close, he has often passed comment on Sexton’s truculence, not least because his own lofty status in the game was no protection from the sharp end of the out-half’s tongue.
Sexton arrived into the chummy world of the late noughties Leinster team like Marlon Brando on a motorcycle.
Hey Johnny, what are you rebelling against? What you have got? When he stood snarling over the prone Ronan O’Gara at Croke Park he fired the start pistol on a decade of unprecedented success for Irish rugby.
There are few better placed than O’Driscoll to understand how Sexton’s volcanic intensity drove his teams to success, how his thundering refusal to concede ground set the tone, but also to understand that captaincy requires more light and shade: the backchannel diplomacy with refs, the husbandry of squad bonhomie, being consigliere to the coach of the day; a little less effing and jeffing at a dropped pass.
Most experts, O’Driscoll and Wood included, insist he is still clearly Ireland’s best out-half and without a realistic challenger will remain so. As captain, Farrell could do with Sexton evolving into a father-figure for his anointed successor, a sort of wise Obi Wan Kenobi of number 10s.
Alas, that probably won’t happen, due to the very competitive nature that has always fuelled him.
O’Driscoll reckons he “still has that selfish buzz to be Ireland’s number 10, also the fact that he’s captain…he wants to hold onto that for as long as he possibly can”. So he’s more likely to adopt the Darth Vader approach, hacking off one of the younger man’s limbs as he steps gingerly from the replacements bench.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Johnny will be negging away as Ireland’s key man until the next World Cup, because it seems he’s right, we can’t do any better than him right now.
