Peter Jackson: Nobody dares to rough up Father Time quite like The Marathon Man
Leinster's Johnny Sexton celebrates Josh van der Flier’s try. Mandatory Credit ©INPHO/Laszlo Geczo
Long after almost all his contemporaries ran out of steam and gave up the ghost, Johnny Sexton keeps climbing every mountain in European rugby.
Nobody dares to rough up Father Time quite like The Marathon Man. He does it now on a serial scale with the same result; the bigger the occasion, the worse the beating for a remorseless old foe who has scythed his way through the Dubliner’s international rivals one by one.
That nobody has been up and down the most forbidding of Alpine peaks more often than Sexton amounts to a fitting a tribute to his powers of endurance. Marseilles on Saturday week will be his sixth final, each and every one reached in Leinster blue.
Nobody has ever been there that often but then no out-half has operated at a higher altitude for the same club for so long. In Sexton’s case, it’s been long enough to overtake a Toulouse quartet who appeared in five finals: Cedric Heymans, Yannick Jauzion, Jean Bouilhou and Jean-Baptiste Poux.
Sexton has won Champions’ Cup finals in Scotland, Wales, England and Spain. Typically, he chose to talk about the one Leinster lost, to Saracens on Tyneside three years ago. "The crowd turned up but we didn’t,’’ he said. ‘’We were outplayed.’’ Old-school principles die hard with Sexton. While confessing that he never thought he would get another chance, the old ringmaster steered well clear of all the talk over the high-octane majesty of Leinster’s victory.
They didn’t merely beat Toulouse, they outclassed them by the bewildering speed of their movement. Sexton talked instead about the ‘need to be better again in the final’, a mission bordering on the impossible given the grandeur of the most one-sided Dublin semi-final since Munster’s choker at Croker 13 years ago.
He enumerated some of Toulouse’s handicaps; being softened up by Munster during the extra-time semi-final, then having to come all the way back. He could also have touched upon another significance difference between the teams.
Man for man, Toulouse had played more than three times as many matches this season as Leinster – six times as many in the case of the No. 10’s (Sexton two starts in the United Rugby Championship, Romain NTamack twelve in the Top 14).
When their second XV can take care of most domestic business, why expose Sexton or Garry Ringrose to being duffed up on a wet night in Newport or a wetter one in Glasgow? It’s hardly Leinster’s fault that they can afford to save their best 23 for Europe and the inter-pros.
That provides Sexton with the perfect environment to prolong his career. At 36 going on 37, he is not exactly hanging on for the odd game but still the most automatic of choices, some achievement given the stellar names all around him.
In stark comparison, the few of similar vintage still going elsewhere are no longer first-choices. Stephen Myler, at 37 a year old than Sexton, will still be in Swansea next season but only as the Ospreys’ back-up to Gareth Anscombe.
Jimmy Gopperth, Leinster’s prolific stand-in for Sexton during his two years in Paris and 39 next month, will be at Leicester next season playing second fiddle, at best, to the Springbok World Cup-winner Handrie Pollard.
Sexton is still so far from playing second fiddle to anyone that he has overtaken every one of the older Test tens of the professional era bar Morne Steyn. The old warrior will surpass the retired Springbok in New Zealand in July by which time he will surely have put Europe back under Leinster’s rule.
They won’t dare say so publicly but they will have seen nothing through the television lens in Lens yesterday to spoil their weekend…
Ronan O’Gara will definitely not be short of motivation
If Leinster subject last year’s finalists to a beating in the same grand manner as their rout of last year’s winners, they will be entitled to lay claim to being the champions of the Champions’ Cup.
How ironic that La Rochelle at the 67,300-seater Stade Velodrome in Marseilles a week next Saturday should require the favourites to pit their wits against an Irishman who knows them inside out: Ronan O’Gara.
A second successive final at the end of his first season as head coach will guarantee the intriguing sub-plot of a rivalry between Ireland’s record-breaking No. 10 and his record-breaking successor. O’Gara will not be short of motivation.
He has a score to settle, one which has lingered since the days when the pair were not exactly known for being the best of pals. The score, from the day when more than 82,000 packed Croke Park to the rafters for the all-Ireland semi-final in 2009, remains a grotesque one in Red Army history.
Sexton came off the bench to replace an injured Felipe Contepomi, now Leinster’s backs coach. The stand-in kicked three goals in a thumping 25-6 win over O’Gara’s Munster and kept his place for the final at Murrayfield three weeks later when Leinster won their first European title, edging Leicester 19-16. The final can wait. The relentless treadmill of professional sport means that short shrift is too often given to the here and now. The exhilarating nature of Leinster’s latest victory demands to be put in some sort of historic perspective.
Their brand of Total Rugby, as irresistible to the spectator as to the opposition, puts them in a class of their own. Toulon stand alone for their hat-trick of titles, the second in 2014 aided and abetted by six World Cup winners – Jonny Wilkinson, Ali Williams, Bryan Habana, Bakkies Botha, Juan Smith, Danie Rossouw. Even with that lot they never knocked out a heavyweight opponent with the panache of Leinster stopping Toulouse inside-the-distance. In winning their last title, against Leinster three years ago, Saracens’ team included seven who finished up losing the World Cup final six months later.
Assuming Tadhg Furlong is fit, Leinster will head for Marseilles with nine Irish Grand Slammers. No finalist has ever had that many.
My team of the weekend
Thomas Ramos (Toulouse)
Pierre Bourgarit (La Rochelle)
Uini Atonio (La Rochelle)
Josh van der Flier (Leinster)
Gregory Alldritt (La Rochelle)
