Johnny Sexton and Ireland's eyes still fixed on rugby's greatest prize of all
EYES ON THE GREATEST PRIZE: Assistant coach Jonathan Sexton during an Ireland Rugby squad training sessio. Pic: David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile.
New season, same long-term goal for Johnny Sexton, and for Ireland.
Eleven games and as many months separate Andy Farrell’s team from their next stab at the biggest prize of all, but winning a World Cup is never not the guiding light.
The global tournament proved to be the one box that Sexton never got to tick as a player, and Ireland’s dismal failure to ever make it past a quarter-final hardly needs to be highlighted. So, yeah, Australia is already square in his sights.
It’s a focus softened by talk of the desire to beat Argentina, Fiji and South Africa on successive weeks in Dublin next month and, by doing so, qualify for the final of the Nations Championship in Twickenham at the back end of November.
He spoke at Ireland’s high-performance yesterday of the need to balance that with the need to see more of those players eager for more chances at the highest level, but the Webb Ellis trophy is always glinting away and catching the eye.
It’s Sexton himself who kept referencing it.
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He gave an honest assessment of last summer’s tour when Ireland blew hot but mostly cold against Australia, Japan and New Zealand. That was actually the jumping off point for voicing the ultimate ambition. Ireland’s white whale.
“Probably wasn't where we wanted to be,” he said of the tour Down Under. “We've kind of acknowledged that and said, ‘How are we going to go about putting ourselves in the frame to talk about going to win a World Cup’?
“Because I've been involved in teams over the years where we've gone to World Cups and we said ‘we're going here to win a World Cup’, and we’re kind of looking at each other because we didn't have any evidence to back up that claim.
“In 2023, we had that evidence behind us. We had, whatever, 20 games unbeaten. We'd won a Grand Slam. We'd gone to New Zealand [and won a series]. All those type of things. So you go, ‘We've done a block of work, this group’.
“Since then, they've won a Championship. They've had some big results, got a record win in Twickenham, record win over in Marseille, those type of things. But we need to build a consistency now over the next 12 months that'll allow us to say that we're going to Australia to do something special.”
This talk, and the timing of it, will inevitably meet with a certain amount of scorn, just like his take that Ireland ‘won and lost’ when exiting the 2023 World Cup in France at the quarter-final stage, but it’s a goal that can’t ever be parked or paused.
If consistency has been a problem in this latest four-year cycle then that’s no barrier to ultimate success. It was Sexton who noted here that the Springboks weren’t exactly firing on all cylinders before claiming the Webb Ellis twice in a row.
And there is no doubt the Irish kicking coach is speaking Farrell’s language.
The head coach set the agenda in the Eden Park dressing-room in June after the All Blacks beat Ireland by 19 points when he signposted an alignment camp the next month. He told them to turn up in the right condition, to be ready to attack the new season.
“And we talked about how we want to go about the season and made a real clear, whatever you want to call it, plan or purpose, and said this is what we're doing this season,” said Sexton. “Like, it's time to ship up, get our shape up, and get our act together."
Approximately 50 players were on site for a one-day camp. Aerobic fitness was integral to it.
“Yeah, that was a big thing. Over the years, again, we talk about the recent years. I think we have been up there with the fittest teams in the world, and we dictated the pace of the game, and we just feel we need to get back to that.
“We're never going to be the biggest, strongest team. Okay, we've made huge strides in that over the years, and we do have a great-sized pack, and they're powerful boys. But we need to make our fitness and the way we play the game our point of difference, because that's how we're going to be successful.”
Sam Prendergast is carrying a wrist injury that sidelined him for Leinster’s game against Munster last weekend, but he was doing some light passing on Tuesday and Sexton said the staff will “see how he progresses” over the coming days.
It might be next week before they have a better picture on his availability for Argentina’s visit to Dublin on November 8th. Tadhg Furlong’s fate will be known by then given he faces a URC disciplinary hearing on Thursday having been cited after that Aviva derby.
“In terms of the incident, I can't say too much about it obviously because the disciplinary process is ongoing. But I know Tadhg as a person, first and foremost, and I don't think that's something he would have done.
“So I just have to, I suppose, back him in that in that regard, but we'll see what happens with the disciplinary hearing,” said Sexton.
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