Not like this, please... Sexton heads forlornly for the hills as the end becomes a reality
PAIN: Jonathan Sexton after the cruel defeat at the Stade de France.
There’s a scene in The Matrix where Apoc is about to quite literally pull the plug on Switch and the rest of the team. Cypher, who can only stand there helplessly and look on as the inevitable happens, utters what everyone else is thinking. “Not like this,” she says. “Not like this.”
We were all Cypher here. Helpless. Horrified. Resigned.
But we’ve been here before.
It was only when the World Cup quarter-final ended, and Ireland’s World Cup with it, that the full import of the moment dawned on the captain. Keith Wood threw his arms around Fabien Galthié, he saluted the crowd as the emotion creased his face and within the hour he was being applauded in to the post-match press conference.
His playing career was already growing cold.
“It’s doubly emotional for me today, losing a World Cup quarter-final and facing up to the fact that I must retire from rugby,” he said after a crushing 43-21 defeat to France 20 years ago. “I have the desire, I’d love to play for another ten years, but the honest truth is that the body has had enough.”
Wood was still only 31. Injuries had caught up on him. His exit from the game he loved owed to medical advice and plain common sense. Johnny Sexton is 38 and looks like a man who could play through to and beyond the age of 40, even after all these immensely rewarding years, but the similarities remain.
Both men took the field – Wood at Melbourne’s Telstra Dome and Sexton here in Paris –believing that this was an evening for an Irish team to go where none had gone before. But add in Paul O’Connell’s career-ending injury against France in 2015 and this is now three Irish legends and captains whose career curtains have fallen too soon at World Cups.
Not so much fallen as collapsed in a heap onto the stage.
Sexton’s disappearance down the tunnel marked ‘Civvie Street’ is, all of a sudden, a truly sobering reality. Ireland moved onwards and upwards after Wood and O’Connell departed the scene. Titles were won, records broken, old piseogs put to bed. The rise of the national team has been inexorable these last two decades but how does that trend continue now?
After this.
The veteran skipper is one of 17 players in this Ireland squad who have already celebrated their 30th birthday. Andy Farrell, his coaches and his players have all reiterated how everything done this last four years was with this tournament in mind. Ireland in 2027 will be a very different proposition.
They were top of the world coming here. They had won 17 games in a row, beating anyone and everyone in the process, and doing it with the rapier and with the bludgeon. South Africa and Scotland had been beaten in Pool B, they had a social movement rather than a fanbase behind them. This was their time.
All of which makes this defeat the toughest to bear. Worse than the Welsh ambush in 2011, than the Argentinian sweep four years later and the loss to New Zealand in Japan in 2019. That last one felt more like an act of mercy than a defeat given the annus horribilis that had led them to that place at that point. This seems just cruel. Jarring.
A piece in L’Equipe this very morning had been headlined ‘Green Machine’ and it told a story about an Ireland team utterly addicted to order and process, right down to the type of shower gel they demanded from the supposedly long-suffering denizens of Tours where they have spent so much of this World Cup.
It detailed the obsessive steps they follow on and off the field and at one point posed the question as to what happens when a side like this needs a Plan B. The defeat of South Africa, when their lineout had crumpled and they had to weather the Springbok storm, had surely answered that, but here was a take two.
Again the lineout became a liability rather than the strength it had so often been in recent years. The Kiwis were bossing the breakdown and working assiduously on the scoreboard with the opening 13 points. The machine was in trouble and, while Ireland kept on plugging on, there were too many component parts in trouble.
Moments will linger. The bounce of the ball that evaded Dan Sheehan out wide and with the line at his mercy. Sexton’s missed penalty on the hour. Caelan Doris’ dropped ball in the last ten minutes which cost Ireland momentum, territory, possession and precious minutes of time to turn the screw.
None of which happened in isolation.
The All Blacks were doubted, they were underdogs, but they were never led, even though they played for 20 of the 80 minutes with 14 men. They hit Ireland for three tries, made the most of it at the ruck, disrupted that lineout and managed to hold out against 37 phases in an astonishing end game.
Thirty arms punched the sky when Ireland couldn’t generate a 38th and Wayne Barnes raised his arm to signal a penalty for the Kiwis with the clock well into the red. Sexton just stood there nearby, his hands on his hips. He stayed there for an eternity, even after the ball was kicked to touch.
Not like this. Not like this.
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