THE REPATRIATION OF JOHNNY SEXTON
ONE journalist close to Johnny Sexton reported that the player moved to Racing in Paris in 2013 because the IRFU refused to pay him a salary that matched their highest earner at the time.
That was understood to be Jamie Heaslip.
It is impossible to imagine that Schmidt would have let his star man move to France had he been in charge of the national team at the time. As it was, he was Sexton’s boss at Leinster when the deal was announced in January 2013, but as a provincial coach he would not have had decisive leverage over a player who was centrally contracted.
Schmidt did make one big call on assuming control of Ireland: he continued picking Sexton throughout what proved to be two tough seasons for the player in Paris.
The player was run ragged in his first three months in France, playing 12 matches in a row that led to fitness problems dogging him for months thereafter. But Schmidt stayed true to him, despite the established (if unspoken) policy of not selecting players based outside of Ireland.
When Simon Zebo’s move to Racing became known, Schmidt spoke about why Sexton was an exceptional case. ‘I was new into the job. To set a rugby team up in the space of a week is an incredibly difficult job.
‘To have a thought process that is very similar to the guy that was running the team was, as much as anything, a real convenience to me going into a new job. He has also proven to be, over the last two Lions tours, the starting player in a Lions Test match.
‘Zeebs has been great for us but he hasn’t reached the same level of selection.’
It worked for all parties: Sexton was the inspiration in back-to-back championships, before inspiring the current gush of success.
Schmidt put his faith in a player he knew would hold everyone else to the highest of standards. ‘In Ireland, it’s a very player-driven environment,’ Sexton recalled.
‘If guys aren’t pulling their weight, their team-mates almost get there before the coach. Over there, I found that players would look after themselves and coaches tell people off. There wasn’t that culture of players giving out to each other. At times, they had to tell me to take a back seat.’