FUTURE PROOFING
Ireland coach Andy Farrell needs to look beyond Johnny Sexton at 10
PARTING threatens to become an extended sorrow for an Ireland rugby team and their most important player. Since the retirement of David Humphreys in the mid2000s, the No10 jersey has been dominated by two enormous personalities.
Ronan O’Gara was Ireland’s most influential player even in all those years when he shared the pitch with Brian O’Driscoll and Paul O’Connell.
His limited capacity to play a running game and his defensive weaknesses meant he never reached the world-class standard that Johnny Sexton, his eventual successor, did.
O’Gara’s career was, however, the result of a marvellous kicking game, from the hand and off the tee, and his cussedness and bravery. So influential did O’Gara become that moving on from him became a prolonged agony that went a long way towards finishing the Ireland coaching career of Declan Kidney.
By the spring of 2012, Sexton was Ireland’s starting out-half, but this was only after a World Cup campaign the previous autumn in which Kidney’s inability to recognise O’Gara’s diminished status and stick with Sexton was fateful.
By the Six Nations the following year, Sexton was the man in possession, until he got injured against England. Rather than revert to O’Gara, Kidney selected Paddy Jackson for a game in Murrayfield.
Jackson was 21 and an unreliable place-kicker, and he had a tough time against the Scots. O’Gara came on and had a nightmare, and then his Ireland career ended when he was dropped for the next game against France, when Jackson again started and Ian Madigan was on the replacements bench. It was the same arrangement for the loss to Italy that ended Kidney’s Ireland career on a grim St Patrick’s weekend in Rome. O’Gara retired within two months, and Sexton was the uncontested playmaker from then on. He should have been going into the 2011 World Cup, but Kidney persisted with O’Gara even as the limitations in his game became more pronounced.
Kidney and O’Gara had a long history from schoolboys’ rugby through the glory years at Munster, but Sexton was the coming talent from 2009 onwards, and he should have been backed.
There is no equivalent alternative emerging now, with Sexton’s own career in its autumn.
He is still the most influential No10 in Irish rugby, but that speaks to the fortunes of his competitors as well as his own abilities.
Joey Carbery remains out for an indefinite time. Ross Byrne is excellent but not getting enough opportunity to develop, either at Leinster or with Ireland, while there is a chorus of opinion that his younger brother, Harry, is the bigger talent. Andy Farrell must ask himself if persisting with a proven but clearly fading talent makes more sense than taking the unavoidable risks that come with selecting a less experienced player instead. It is shaping up to be the question that defines Farrell’s tenure.
Sexton was wrong to shake his head when he was replaced against France last week, and his explanation for it seemed seasoned with a hefty dose of resentment. He sounded like a man who objected to the coverage of what he did, more than he regretted the incident.
It was impetuous and unbecoming of a captain, and Farrell should have been firmer in his public analysis of it, too.
No player, not even Sexton, should conduct themselves like that.
However, there is a bigger issue here for Farrell, and that is Sexton’s form. In the three biggest games he has played this season, he has been ineffective.
England and Saracens used similar tactics to neutralise him. A rush defence left him no space and time in which to start moves, and there was no alternative plan in response on either occasion. In Paris last Saturday night, he looked laboured, too. There were some brilliant interventions, which are to be expected of a player of his class and composure, but he was also found out in defence.
And as France swamped Ireland in the second half, there was no meaningful reaction.
In all three defeats, the responsibility fell to more than Sexton, and there are other problems in the Irish side that need addressing.
But there is no position more important than the out-half one.
Sexton is 35 and, good as he has been, he is not the future. Farrell has a duty to plan for the years ahead, not merely the next match.
Discarding Sexton makes little sense, but planning to move beyond him should be a priority. Ross Byrne deserves a fair chance in the coming weeks.
Succession can be painful and ruthless. It has to happen.