SHANE McGRATH Ambitious Sexton torches Irish ‘good loser’ stereotype
AS WITLESS and willing as tackle bags, Six Nations clichés are a durable part of the championship. It took only two rounds of this year’s tournament to expose them as hollow nonsense. Each competitor country has their ill-fitting stereotype.
The Italians are dangerous, possess forwards more frightening than the most ruthless Roman legion and are improving, runs the old saw. The anthem had hardly finished on opening day in the Stadio Olimpico when this was shown to be nonsense.
They are disimproving because their best players are ageing past the point of effectiveness; their forwards lumber with creaking inefficiency and they should pose absolutely no threat whatsoever to properly equipped tier one teams.
The Welsh? Their stereotype is borrowed from the 1970s, wears a baggy jersey and is adorned with sideburns that weigh two stone in rain. Wales are celebrated as adherents to rugby in its purest and most luxurious form.
But under Warren Gatland, their success is in significant part due to Warrenball, the tactic that trusts behemoths to punch repeatedly at the opposition defensive line through crashing carry after crashing carry, with width put on the ball only after the rival defenders have been bamboozled by lumpen attacks. It can be effective but don’t confuse it with the game played by JPR Williams.
France are supposed to be the thrilling unknowables, when really they are easier and more boring to read than the recipe for onion soup. There has not been a consistent, classy French national team in a generation, and it was laughable to read sages wonder which France would show up in Dublin last weekend?
Anyone who had been paying attention would know the answer: the dirty, second-rate, uninspiring mob that has trooped around the playing pitches of the world spreading mediocrity in its wake for years.
Romance and faux Celtic mysticism swirls around the hackneyed image of Scotland, but the two most vivid features of their rugby in living memory were the late, great Bill McLaren, and their anthem. They now have an excellent coach and the good work done by Gregor Townsend at Glasgow can nourish the ambi-
tions of Vern Cotter, but he will make Scotland good by turning them into a cussed side. There will be no pan pipes about the game Cotter bolts onto Scottish rugby – and they will be the better for it.
Clichés are reductive and lazy, and those traditionally applied to England and Ireland were the laziest going, just as they are now the most endangered.
Stuart Lancaster’s side were supposed to be massive brutes menacing their way to victory, and even the outstanding back play they have produced in their opening two wins has been attributed in some places to chance. As if were it not for the intercession of injuries, England would be keeping the ball amongst eight fat forwards intent on goring their opponents into submission.
We should be uncomfortably familiar with our own stereotype, that of 15 panting savages full of heart and liquor who would buck like mules against expectation for a good 50 minutes, before collapsing in a heap and watching opponents zip around them to the try line.
No country has been transformed in the professional age like Ireland, a point rarely acknowledged but obvious when the effectiveness of the provinces is considered. Under Eddie O’Sullivan, much of the old wisdom about Irish rugby was exposed as redundant, but it lingered like limescale through the Declan Kidney reign.
It was not until the arrival of Joe Schmidt that Ireland’s highly coached abilities were recognised, but then the credit was attributed almost entirely to the New Zealander, as if until he started Ireland had depended on the gifts of Brian O’Driscoll, boots of Ronan O’Gara and inspiration of Paul O’Connell.
Schmidt is one of the outstanding reasons for Ireland’s success last year and he is the most relevant reason for the grand predictions made about the national team at the World Cup later this year. But Ireland’s greatest inspiration is based in Paris.
With his performance last Saturday Johnny Sexton proved himself the most indispensable part of the intricate plan for 2015 being constructed by Schmidt. The team play with a breadth of imagination and a willingness to be daring when Sexton is on the field that becomes clearly visible only in his absence.
Ian Keatley was courageous and competent in Rome but the team performance against France was vastly improved thanks mainly to the return of Sexton. There has simply never been a player who so thoroughly challenges the age-old impression of talented but feckless Irish rugby men – and that includes O’Driscoll.
For years he was the only pinprick of light on days of ravaging humiliation, and O’Driscoll probably had more instinctive talents than Sexton. But the No10 is the ideal guide for this sophisticated, tactics-oriented side. He is the mechanism that ensures time is kept in Schmidt’s precise machine.
O’Connell and Seán O’Brien are next in importance, prominent in blasting through the bluster and leading team-mates who are coldly ambitious. Sexton is the irreplaceable element in Schmidt’s plans, however.
There is enough talent to scrabble together a solution posed by injury in any other position, but the loss of Sexton would be ruinous to the goals of this group.
Schmidt must know this, even if he can never say it. Sexton is Ireland’s inspiration, and if England are beaten this day week he will be at the scheming core of the victory, sending rivals and clichés retreating before him on another victorious day for a new Ireland.