Sexton: Provinces can inspire Ireland

Jonathan Sexton wants Ireland to take advantage of the winning culture established by the provinces over a decade of Heineken Cup competition as they bid to see off the battle hardened Pumas at the Aviva Stadium tomorrow.

With 2015 World Cup ranking points at the heart of Ireland’s task, this has become much more than just an Autumn friendly.

The number 10, who wins his 34th cap, has resisted looking at the different IRB ranking scenarios and is concentrating on eradicating the mistakes made against South Africa.

“If you go in simply hoping for a win you probably won’t get it,” he said.

“The second half against South Africa, we were probably hoping to hold on to our lead rather than going and attacking the game like we did in the first half.

“It’s all about the performance and trying to get the little things right, trying to forget about winning and concentrate on the performance. That’s not easy, obviously we all desperately want to win and it’s about trying to control what you can control and hoping that the result looks after itself.”

Ireland are on a run of five defeats with a list of injuries much higher ranked sides would find difficult to cope with and that has added to the pressure.

But Sexton believes the side have been unfortunate not to get some positive results.

“We have had results that have got away from us by one score or less and that’s been tough to take. “It could have been so different if we had turned a few of those results around in our favour.

“But we are where we are, it’s disappointing the run of results that we’ve had, but we can’t do anything about that, we can only go forward.

“I thought we should have done it against South Africa the position we were in at half-time but the ten-minute spell after half time just killed us.

“Obviously we went down to 14 men, conceded ten points and we were chasing it from there.

“That was tough to take but if we had controlled our performance, particularly in the second half, it could have been a lot different.”

Although self-assessment was high on the agenda all week, Ireland analysed Argentina’s strength in the forwards. It led Sexton to insist that Ireland must not give away field position easily.

“We can’t give away penalties and we have to deal with kicks in behind us and high balls otherwise we are going to give them the field position they crave, from where they can get their driving maul set up and where they can get attacking scrums.

“That’s pretty much what happened against South Africa, we didn’t want to give them any lineouts inside our 22 because their maul was almost impossible to stop. But we gave it to them once, they scored off it once and we ended up with a yellow card.”