‘When Johnny Sexton speaks to Leinster or Ireland, emotion is always close to the surface’
Johnny Sexton of Ireland celebrates victory after the Six Nations win over England at Twickenham. Picture: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images
You’ve likely heard lately what a struggle it could be for Keith Earls to play rugby at the highest level, but it’s only when you actually read his book that you appreciate what sustained him. Along with all the support and the grit that he had, what kept him going was his love of the game and the moments it could provide.
Like the final match of last season’s Six Nations against England when he made a somersault to catch and finish a cross-kick from a certain team-mate; the only pity was with the score disallowed, the smile vanished too. Or the try he scored a couple of games earlier that they didn’t erase, and the brilliance of the person who again provided the assist meant Earl’s smile couldn’t be wiped off either. In the closing minute of a blowout win against Italy, Ireland had brought the ball up to the 5m line when suddenly Johnny Sexton whipped out a pass to Earls off his left hand, “an absolute bullet”, taking out two Italian defenders and leaving the Munster man with a handy touchdown in the corner.
“It [the smile] is not because I’ve scored,” he writes in . “It is out of admiration for the pass. Just the speed and precision of it. I was smiling because it was so good.”
Smiling because Sexton is so good. In Earls’ eyes, he hasn’t played with anyone better.
“Sexton is the best player I’ve ever played with,” he contends, accepting that he was “privileged” to play with some other “great ones” that he doesn’t namecheck, but could: his great confidant Paul O’Connell; Ronan O’Gara, who he chose to write the foreword of his book; and Brian O’Driscoll. Yet without wanting to cause any offence, and yet without apology, he declares, “Sexton is the greatest, for me. What he gets out of a team, what he gets out of himself, his whole understanding of the game is world class… For me, he’s one of the greatest Irish sportsmen of the last 20 years.”
It wasn’t always obvious that Sexton was going to be the player he’d become, at least not to everybody. As noted last week by Peter O’Reilly, the ghostwriter of a book Sexton himself will be bringing out over the next few years, he was only a back-up player on an Irish schools tour to Australia. He was left off a junior World Cup squad as a couple of players called Kieran Hallett and Conan Doyle were favoured ahead of him. While contemporaries like Luke Fitzgerald and Rob Kearney were brought straight into the Leinster academy, he had to wait, go back playing AIL club with St Mary’s, and work in a bank.
“He was always very confident though,” Kearney has observed, “as if he knew deep down that he would get there.”
Others could also see he had the eye of the tiger. Enda McNulty always remembers when he himself was starting out as a performance coach and he was asked to talk to a rugby team in St Mary’s College in Rathmines.
The dressing room was small, box-like and freezing, with players blowing into their hands and muttering and sniggering, wondering when this would be over.
“But there was one guy — tall, slender, black hair — who was sitting alone and alert on the bench, utterly focused on what I was saying,” McNulty recalls at the start of his own book, . “Throughout the 40 minutes, his concentration never flagged. He was completely engaged. Though he never spoke, his focus — his unwavering fix upon what I was saying — was like an independent force in the room.
“Afterwards I asked the coach: ‘Who’s that young fella, the tall one with the dark hair?’ And he told me: ‘His name is Jonathan Sexton.’”
Shane Jennings, an old St Mary’s boy himself, could see the hunger too. He was two or three years ahead of Sexton in school, but has an indelible memory of this 14-year-old kid constantly out on the pitch in Kenilworth Square, practising his goalkicking.
“He had this almost unrivalled love of the game. He was like a rugby nerd. Every match on television — Six Nations, Pro14, southern hemisphere, Premiership — he’d watch it, he’ll watch it. He’d remind me of Leo [Cullen] that way, he has such a passion for the game, he’s such a student of the game, and you’ll still get that today with the way he’ll go to work on his laptop and be able to analyse a game.”
It’s interesting that Jennings should cite the similarities between Cullen and Sexton. In Sam Walker’s well-regarded book , the common denominator and most vital figure in groundbreaking, dominant sports teams is the leadership of a key player or two: more than talent, finance, or managerial genius.
According to Walker’s thesis, such leaders don’t have to be particularly skilful. What they need and tend to be is extremely dogged and focused in competition, have a willingness to do thankless jobs in the shadows and have a low-key, practical, and democratic communication style. In other words, such leaders and players tend less to be your Johnny Sextons and Brian O’Driscolls as your Leo Cullens and Shane Jennings, whose return from England quite a few attribute as a key factor in Leinster’s transformation from pretenders into champions.
But there’s another thesis Walker has: the span of a great dominant team invariably corresponds in some way to the arrival and departure of one particular player. And if there was a watershed moment in Leinster rugby it was when Johnny Sexton came on for Felipe Contepomi in the 2009 Heineken Cup semi-final, rugby’s equivalent of Tom Brady taking the baton from — off — Drew Bredsloe. Mere brilliance making way for true greatness.
“Even the way he ran on to replace Felipe, I remember it so clearly,” Seán O’Brien noted in his book, . “It was as if he was saying: ‘Right, this is my time now.’ ”
On top of his exceptional skill levels, he possessed the key leadership traits that Walker identifies. He has a steel about him, on and off the field. He is comfortable having uncomfortable conversations.
O’Brien tells the story of when Enda McNulty told him at the start of the 2016-17 season that he wasn’t focusing enough on honing his craft as a rugby player and was instead spending too much time coaching and even farming back in Carlow.
Rather than just take his word for it though, McNulty recommended that O’Brien should seek out a second opinion and talk to Sexton who would “give it to you between the eyes”. When they met over coffee, Sexton told him: “I think you are a brilliant lad, a brilliant rugby player, and a great friend and everything, but you do too much for people.”
After that, O’Brien cut out his coaching, and by the end of the season was starting and starring for the Lions.
“A lot of what you see with Johnny is what you get,” says Jennings. “The perception of him being the kind of leader that barks orders, demanding high standards, is exactly what he is. But what people don’t see is that away from the field he is great fun. He is not just highly respected, but highly liked by his peers. He’s not this sour-puss all the time that people might think. He’s a great guy to be around, and that’s one of the reasons why he’s such a good and effective leader.”
Every team-mate testifies the same. Often the code for someone prepared to challenge and confront team-mates is that ‘they’re not afraid to fall out with you’. But with Sexton, it’s different. With him, there’s no fear that he’ll fall out with you, so he’s all the more emboldened to confront and challenge you. At times he might be your biggest critic but — because — he’s also your biggest supporter and best buddy.
“It’s the old cliché, but it’s so true in the case of Johnny,” says Jamie Heaslip. “When he’s criticising you, it’s never personal, it’s just business.”
Mike Ross has seen all sides of Sexton and how they complement each other. “I don’t know a Leinster fella who hasn’t crossed swords or exchanged cross words with Johnny at some point,” he says, taking a call in Portugal between sessions at the Web Summit. “I remember in training one time he had a go at me because he felt I wasn’t where I should have been on a defensive line, and I made the mistake of disagreeing with him, so he went at me.”
Sexton may even have swung for him. Ross shoved back. But he couldn’t strike.
“I wasn’t happy with him, but you couldn’t take the head off him either because you knew you needed him at the weekend.
“He’s often dragged us across the line practically by himself because of that doggedness. To me, he’s only a cranky lad because he’s driven to succeed. And as a number 10 you almost need that. ROG was the same, because they’re the ones who are driving the team and the game plan. So when he’d have a go at me, I appreciated it, or at least understood it, because I knew where he was coming from.
“Off the field, you couldn’t meet a better fella. A very special memory I have is of the night before we played Italy in a Six Nations game in 2014. We were staying in the Shelbourne Hotel and [Ross’s wife] Kim called in with our little Kevin. I told her to get a break and wander through some of the shops on our own, and I brought Kevin up to the team room.
“Once he spotted Johnny, that’s all he could see. And Johnny grabbed a ball and they headed off into the large empty physio room and started kicking the ball around. And when I looked in, I could see Johnny teaching my three-year-old how to step back and move to the side!
“A couple of years later he did something the same again: he got me to take Kevin out of junior infants early and join him for his Wednesday kicking session. And Kevin will remember that forever, spending time kicking and retrieving balls with the great Johnny Sexton. He has that generous nature. He’s one of the lads I’d still personally be in touch with.”
Heaslip remains a friend too. This week, for RTÉ, he sat down with his old mucker much the way Shane Horgan did for a piece on the eve of Brian O’Driscoll’s final international game. Only this past August their families hung out with Cian Healy’s and Eoin O’Malley’s together on holidays in Portugal.
“I’m probably a bigger fan of Johnny off the pitch than Johnny on the pitch — and I got on well with him on the pitch,” says Heaslip. “Away from the game, he’s very considerate and even soft-mannered and good fun, especially when I get my arms around him and down some whiskey down his neck!
“But a lot of people can’t see beyond the competitor he is on the field. I’d be of the same age as him and would have a lot of buddies who would have played against him at U20s or the AIL and they’d say: ‘Sexton is a real mouthy dickhead.’
“And I’ve said it before, but you should have seen the faces on the guys on the Lions tour in 2013 who hadn’t known him before. They couldn’t believe his bark and his bite. But that’s just the competitor he was and is on the field. You’d want him on your team, and off it you’d still want to be around him.
“The thing you’ve to understand about Johnny is that he’s best when he’s in flow, like every player. In training you have two speeds. First, there’s learning speed, which is very slow, almost a walkthrough, helping you ingrain the pattern. Then you have match speed, and it’s full on. But you’re still only testing things, so if you make a mistake at match speed, you move on, like you have to in a game, you can’t let it linger. That’s why we record the session: so you can look back on it at learning speed. But you want to stay at that match speed, or at least I would, and Eoin Reddan would. And we’d drive Johnny mad, because he’d be barking at us and we’d just ignore him, which would drive him even more insane. ‘Johnny, I don’t give a feck if I made a mistake there, I’m onto the next thing, we can talk about it later!’ Or ‘Oh, yeah, you’re right, next ball!’
Rob Kearney is another who would get both the brunt of Sexton’s harsh tongue and also the warmth of his soft side — often within the same day, the same hour. Last year, just two days out from Leinster’s first game back from the initial lockdown, they conducted a short full-contact game in the RDS. Kearney was at full-back in a red bib, trying to replicate what Munster would be bringing 48 hours later. At one point a Leinster player found himself stuck on the ‘Munster’ side of the ruck. Kearney smacked him on the back, telling him to get out of the way, only to be shouldered himself in the back. When he squared up to the culprit, he discovered it was Sexton.
“He was pissed with me and I was pissed with him and the two of us got into a bit of pushing, which accelerated into a few swings,” Kearney recalled in his book, , last year. Eventually, Scott Fardy and Seán Cronin came in and broke the two of them up. But once the session was over, the two of them sought each other, grinning sheepishly, before exchanging a laugh and a hug.
An hour later the pair of them were back in Sexton’s house, eating sausage sandwiches and steak along with James Lowe, Cian Kelleher, Fergus McFadden, and Jamison Gibson Park. Then they drove to UCD for a private concert with Christy Moore, only for Leo Cullen and Sexton to say a few words to honour a couple of departing servants: Kearney and McFadden. Sexton got emotional. “When Johnny speaks to Leinster or Ireland, emotion is always close to the surface,” noted Kearney, “because those groups are like a second family to him”.
Then a video montage of their highlights was shown before the fathers of Kearney and McFadden popped up on the big screen to say a few words. Later Kearney learned it was Sexton who Zoom-called them and lined it up.
“The timing was just right,” wrote Kearney. “Everything unfolded perfectly. Johnny and myself, still more warriors than old codgers, had gone at each other, but then came the easy resumption of our old friendship.”
It doesn’t surprise Heaslip or Ross to see Sexton still playing at the level he is. Ross notes that a turning point in Leinster’s preparation was the signing of Brad Thorn and the importance he placed on stretching and loosening up, and how Heaslip and Sexton in particular adopted a similar regimen themselves. “I’m delighted to see him, Johnny 100 Caps, because of the diligence he puts into things like that,” says Ross.
Heaslip noticed in their time together in Portugal that Sexton asked quite a bit about how life is like on the other side of playing rugby. Heaslip didn’t hide that it would be particularly challenging for him, as much as a balanced lifestyle ensuring plenty of family time with Laura and their three kids has helped his longevity.
“I said to him: ‘It’s going to be different to you, Johnny, than anyone else.’ I mean, he’s one of only two Irish players to win World Rugby Player of the Year. And Woodie [Keith Wood] wouldn’t have won nearly as much as Johnny would have in the game. No one in Ireland has won more than Johnny.
“And that competitor is still very much there. There’s a lot of talk about succession plans, but it ain’t going to be handed over to them. Felipe and ROG didn’t hand it over to Johnny: he had to go and grab it himself. And I think that’s been missed by people. It’s grand talking about the claims of the others, but none of them are near taking it off him. If anything, the gap is widening between him and everyone else.”
100 and not out.
Still simply the best.
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