Sexton: We’ll remain grounded
After helping Joe Schmidt’s side complete a first autumn clean sweep since 2006 when similar things were expected before a World Cup year, Sexton — bearing the scars from a bang to the head that forced him off late on against Australia — believes that pressure sits relatively easily with the squad.
“The expectation comes from within the camp,” the Racing Metro outhalf said. “You know, we do realise how much it means to people and the high that it gives the country.
“I suppose the expectancy is nice because it means we’re performing. It puts a bit more pressure on us but we have Joe putting the pressure on us in camp, that’s the only pressure you can worry about.
“And the pressure we put on ourselves, the pressure Paul [O’Connell] puts on us as captain, that’s the pressure that matters. We try to tunnel our vision.”
O’Connell somehow summoned the energy to drive Ben McCalman backwards in the 79th minute as Australia looked to launch a decisive break from deep, and Sexton revealed some painful analysis of the final moments of last year’s defeat to New Zealand laid the basis for Saturday’s supreme defensive effort.
“It’s frightening facing them at times,” Sexton continued. “The courage and our ferocity in defence and how much we wanted to win got the crowd up for it more so than style of play.”
“I suppose the big learning from New Zealand was that last seven minutes, how we could do things different and it was probably the worst video session you could imagine, we had to relive that seven minutes again and the defensive errors we made.
“And we learned from them. We didn’t do the same thing against Australia when they had us under pressure in those last few minutes, we didn’t make the system errors and we stayed patient and then we got the turnover when we had to.
“So from that regard, yeah, we’d still like to go back and play that seven minutes against New Zealand again but I’m sure we’ll face them over that World Cup campaign.”
Sexton said Ireland didn’t use all of the attacking strategies that they had worked on, but the result of that is more fine-tuning of existing plans rather than devising completely new ones.
“We played with the ball a little bit better in the second half against Australia at times,” he continued.
“We didn’t show a whole lot which will be good for... you know, we don’t have to come up with much new in the Six Nations. We can just use what we had planned to use and show it then.
“We will take that positive. It’s great we are talking about all these deficiencies in our play off the back of three wins. It is a nice place to be and it’s a good thing that we’re doing it. We would probably be talking about the same things if we had lost and that is what we will do in our performance with Joe.
I’m repeating myself but we know we have plenty to improve on and we will work at that and hopefully we will be even better come the Six Nations.
“I’m sure the players will have an input. We always do with Joe. I think we did it by phone a couple of times. He rang a couple of guys in that leadership group. At times he rings everybody. At times he sends out an email and we reply, for those of us who can write and spell, we write back!
“He takes all that on board and he will make the final analysis of things and put it to us in the Christmas camp. At times he doesn’t look for player feedback because he is certain of what is going on.
I’m not sure what he will do over the next couple of weeks when he’s better, when he’s healthy, but I know come December we will have plenty to work on like we did for this campaign and after the summer tests against Argentina.
“Whatever we did worked but we know it might not be good enough come the Six Nations and we have to have more strings to our bow.”
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