Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
2018 A BIT OF ALL WRITE
Sexton picks up another top award but beating All Blacks tops the lot
JOHNNY SEXTON has revealed that beating the All Blacks at home is his personal highlight of a dream year.
The 33-year-old picked up the Guinness RWI Player of the Year award last night and has a strong case to be named as the World Rugby equivalent in Monte Carlo on Sunday.
The latest personal accolade comes after a dream 2018 in which:
nerveless, last-gasp drop goal in France kickstarted Ireland’s successful Grand Slam campaign
then guided Leinster to a brilliant European Cup and PRO14 double
WAS then was the onfield orchestrator for the historic series win in Australia over the summer
rounded it off by being a key cog in Saturday’s first-ever home victory over New Zealand.
“If someone had told me that we’d win all this at the start of the year, I would’ve laughed at them,” admitted Sexton. “At the same time it’s what you dream of as well.
“You always have to think big and we’re certainly doing that but it’s the work that goes on behind the scenes that people don’t see.
“They just see the end product and you can often work as hard as that in all the previous years and get nothing out of it.
“Then one year it all falls into place so it’s funny how things work out. It’s always special to win the first time so to beat New Zealand in Ireland for the first time is very, very special. Grand Slams had been done before so you could argue that that’s probably the highlight.”
Typically, the gifted out-half agrees with the view that Ireland will still have to improve.
“New Zealand will say they weren’t at their best and we’ll feel we put a lot of pressure on them to make the game like that,” he remarked. “But they’ll learn a lot from that game and they’ll get better – if they have room for that after the season they’ve had, demolishing everyone in the Rugby Championship bar one game.
“Now in the Six Nations we’re going to have a target on our head and teams are going to play us as the underdog.
“So we’re going to have to come up with a way to deal with that. That’s the challenge for us now.
“They’re clearly the best in the world and we matched them on one day – now we’ve got to keep going and keep ourselves up near the top.
“A lot of the public want to drag us to the World Cup straight away and start talking about it but it’s Six Nations for us now and backing things up.”