Leinster laments and Jonny’s farewell take back seat as Ross bids to refocus on the task in hand

The shadow of the Six Nations creeps and grows, but there’s something a little different this time around. For once, it’s not all consuming. Mike Ross sits in front of you, trying to focus on what lies ahead but the tentacles of the recent past visibly toy with his thoughts.

With Leinster gone at the pool stages of the Heineken Cup for the first time since he joined from Harlequins in 2009, and with Jonny Sexton gone where so few Irish men have gone before, to ignore what’s after happening and to purely focus on the Welsh test is to live a lie.

Normally the end of this phase of the Heineken Cup is met with a punctuation mark but, this season, it and the international scene aren’t separate entities, instead black and white have mixed and merged. “On a personal level, I’m very disappointed we are losing him,” the prop sighs of Sexton. “He’s been a great, great player for the last couple of years. It’s going to be so hard to replace him even though we do have some good players, like Ian Madigan who has been doing well in his absence, and hopefully he’ll be able to step it up again next year. But historically Irish players haven’t travelled to France. They’ve often talked about it but it’s never really happened and this is the first big player to go over, I suppose, since Mick O’Driscoll. Will we have an exodus situation though? I don’t think that’ll be the case. With the size of the offer we don’t blame Jonny one bit, but I can’t imagine there’ll be too many offers like that coming players’ ways. That needs to be remembered.”

But were you surprised, we ask?

“Yeah, I think that’s fair enough, to say I didn’t see it coming. I think it surprised everyone in the camp. I was pretty confident he would stay and a deal would be done with the IRFU but there must have been just too much between them. The scales are different when you consider the reported offer and when that’s the case, it’s hugely difficult to match the money on this end. That’s just the way it is in club rugby.”

However if Sexton’s is a move that won’t have obvious implications for the national team until next season, Leinster’s surrender of their Heineken Cup title so early in the year certainly will. Coming off the field in Exeter, Ross looked around and sensed that it was never going to be enough. He’d seen the squad that Racing Metro had sent to Limerick, and watching that Munster game at home, he nearly turned off the television for the day when Antoine Battut saw red. But in terms of Ireland, it’s changed the dynamic of the season. With due respect, no one dreams of winning the Challenge Cup or the RaboDirect Pro12, so for 15 of the 33-man Irish panel, this Six Nations is going to be as good as it gets this time around. Over their horizon, for a change, there is little.

“It makes you realise you can’t have constant success, like we’ve had year after year. That makes you realise you’ve to appreciate what you’ve had and it makes you hungrier for more and hopefully that will carry into the Irish set-up now and something good can come from it. But it’s not just about how our exit affects the Leinster players. The way Ulster have come on enormously, and with Munster in the quarter-finals, in a bigger context that’s a good thing because it’s not good for Irish rugby just having one side dominating. If all three or four provinces are competing and winning, that’s good for the national side because you have confident players that are used to winning on the big stage. They’ll know what it takes to win and that adds to a national team.”

You muse about unrealistic international expectations based on provincial form, though. With Ireland’s entire squad playing for the four provinces for now, the players aren’t as spread out on the club scene as others (Wales’ squad comes from 11 clubs, England, Scotland and France’s from nine and Italy’s from eight). Also, the IRFU are careful in how they use their players compared to France and England in particular, largely priming their players for Europe’s best. But Ross doesn’t see any of it as an excuse and expects much more from Ireland, starting now.

“I think we’ve actually underachieved at times and haven’t done what’s expected of us and what we expected of ourselves. At the same time, the Irish players are spread around the four provinces, sure, and the English players are spread around clubs but then you have to take into account their playing numbers. There is a huge amount of top-quality players and because of that, it doesn’t make so much difference. It all balances out, in a way. The IRFU have had to be very smart about how they manage their playing resources and they have been because at the end of the day, we don’t have the same playing numbers as France and England or even Wales.

“But we put a lot of pressure on ourselves. We hadn’t really won a game of note in quite a while. In fact before Argentina, we’d lost five in a row, which isn’t acceptable for us. You can talk about Declan Kidney and pressure, but we were no different. We are used to winning things, all these guys, and especially in a national jersey you want to win every time you pull on that jersey. For a while there it wasn’t working like that, which wasn’t good enough. We aren’t running away from that fact, we want to face up to it and make it right. That’s why we don’t buy into this idea of being in transition either. There are a few new players in there but that can’t be transition because there’s a lot of experience there too.”

Recent results against Wales have annoyed Ross but a win Saturday can put it right. Indeed if that happens, soon the Six Nations could again be all-consuming and put what’s gone on within Leinster recently out of sight and out of mind.