Nobody can make you feel inferior without consent
Last Sunday morning my old Sunday Tribune colleague Neil Francis believed Declan Kidney’s choice of out-half for the Scotland game would see “a year and a half of player development and confidence go down the pan”.
Even someone as nuanced in the mental game as Kidney, he seemed to be overly-concerned by Sexton’s current belief levels by bringing him on when Ireland most needed O’Gara left on.
It’s worth recalling the last time Ireland played Scotland. The Monday after Ireland blew the Triple Crown in Croke Park, Enda McNulty and his Motiv8 team gave a seminar on confidence at a hotel on the outskirts of Limerick, the overriding message being that confidence was a choice.
A member of the audience had his doubts, arguing Sexton could struggle to recover from the fact that his misses had effectively cost Ireland the Triple Crown.
Sexton happened to be a client of McNulty’s and McNulty expressed his confidence that the Leinster man would be fine. Sure enough, the following weekend Sexton was quoted liberally in all of the Sunday newspapers, a pleasant surprise to someone like myself predominantly on the GAA beat at the time and accustomed to players “keeping the head down” after a heavily-scrutinised performance.
He spoke illuminatingly about while he would have liked to have been kept on for the last 20 minutes of the game, he was happy with his overall play. His deadball kicking was in the spotlight but largely because it had been so good in the autumn internationals and with Leinster.
“There’s something a bit off,” he said, “and I’ll get it sorted.” Instead of deriding his whole game, Sexton chose to view his under-performance in one aspect as a mere “blip”.
Elite athletes tend to do that while the rest of us — the public, the media, those who regularly lose in sport — operate by the reverse principle, making setbacks permanent and victories temporary.
Last summer both the reigning All-Ireland champions were beaten in the first round of the championship. Cork could have bought into the notion that they were chokers; Tipperary, that they were too soft. That same evening in Cork, Liam Sheedy was telling some players they would still win the All-Ireland. A couple of days after ballooning a crucial free into the arms of Micheal Quirke, Donncha O’Connor had parked it. Poor Trevor Mortimer in contrast couldn’t bring himself to leave his house for the four days after Mayo’s league final defeat to Cork, a setback his teammates wouldn’t recover from either.
Last Sunday the RTÉ studio panel deemed the current plight of the national team as a “monstrous crisis”, as if it was on the scale of where the team was in the autumn of 2007. Back then the team itself indulged in such paralysis by analysis, sending them into a downward spiral of negativity that compounded their woes. It’s a lesson the team has absorbed; last Sunday evening Jamie Heaslip was tweeting for some followers to “take their negativity elsewhere”.
Sexton likewise won’t allow his confidence to go “down the pan”, just as it didn’t after his previous setback against Scotland. In last Sunday’s papers he was again pointing out that he couldn’t control whether Kidney selected him or not, only his reaction to it.
In that respect he is operating in the same realm as O’Gara in the mental toughness stakes, if not quite at the same height. O’Gara has also taken the view Kidney’s selection is out of his control — while doing his utmost to regain and retain the jersey isn’t.
Last month he made the distinction between Munster’s recent Heineken Cup results and his own performances, noting the latter had been satisfactory. Sexton’s sustained run in the number 10 jersey didn’t affect his confidence either.
There’s something heroic about O’Gara’s defiance to play along to the assumed script that he should be a mere backup. As decorated as his career has been, he has yet to have a remotely satisfying World Cup and 2011 represents his last chance to have one. He wants to start in it and Kidney shrewdly recognised that for him to have a chance of doing so he needed to start in a game like last Sunday.
Ireland needed him to finish it too. The Americans have a term for a player like him — “a closer”. O’Gara is one of the best European rugby has known. Last Sunday when the momentum had swung against Ireland, ‘the closer’ should have been let close the game out. It was as if Kidney was making a sop to Sexton, underestimating his confidence level, even if they’re not quite at the high watermark that is O’Gara’s. Then again, even Pep Guardiola recently slipped up in the substitution stakes, taking off goalscorer David Villa instead of killing Arsenal off.
As Sexton could vouch, such errors are temporary, just as O’Gara underlined last Sunday that class is permanent.
* kieranshannon@eircom.net
