AT FIRST GLANCE, there aren’t any obvious signs that Johnny Sexton had a procedure on his face only a few short weeks ago.
He points towards a subtle nick in the hairline on the left side of his head by way of explaining how the operation was carried out. The marvels of medical science.
“I didn’t want to ruin my good looks,” jokes Sexton.
He was in good form in Portugal yesterday. Why wouldn’t he be? He was only very recently worried that this Six Nations might be taken away from him. Sexton suffered the injury in his high tackle on Connacht’s Jarrad Butler on New Year’s Day and he struggled to sleep with the stress and the pain that night.
But he was soon going under the knife as the doctor made sure the damaged bone was aligned in order to heal.
“It’s amazing really,” says Sexton. “But I had done research on it immediately. I couldn’t sleep that night obviously. I did research on basketball players that had played a week later, seven days later, with the mask. They were allowed, we’re not allowed wear masks.
“So once I’d read things like that and spoke to doctors, they were pretty optimistic and positive that I’d be back in no time.”
Sexton has been training with a protective face mask on at Ireland’s camp in Portugal over the last week but it came off for yesterday’s session and he got through it without any ill effects. Mack Hansen took the mask from Sexton, who is not sure what the colourful Ireland wing has done with it.
It all means Sexton is fit and ready to captain Ireland into his 14th Six Nations. He first played in the championship in 2010 but he loved this competition long before that.
“I don’t remember the details too much but I just remember being in the stadium for a Scotland game,” says Sexton of his youth.
“The Scottish guy beside me fell asleep for the game. I was eight years old and I spent most of my time looking at him wondering why he was asleep. Whatever was in his flagon in his hip pocket might have had something to do with it.
“Memories like that… Keith Wood, I remember the excitement around when he got the ball. They were my earliest memories.”
It’s all the more intriguing this weekend because Sexton goes up against Warren Gatland’s Wales team.
It’s not long ago that Gatland left Sexton out of his 2021 Lions squad to tour South Africa. The Wales boss admitted this week that he probably made the wrong decision and Sexton insists that there is no animosity there. They met at the recent Six Nations launch in London, shook hands, and had a chat.
“I don’t get to tackle him or I don’t get to do anything to him,” jokes Sexton when asked if he still wants to prove a point to Gatland.
“I’m not playing against him, I’m playing against Wales. It’s his team obviously but look, what happened two years ago, it’s gone now. You don’t get it back.”
Nonetheless, Sexton reflects on the pain that decision caused him at the time.
“Did it motivate me? Yeah. It gave me a bit of time to mull things over and go, ‘Do I want to go out like this or do I want to go out in two or three years’ time at the top?’
“It was gutting. I’d saved my Lions’ Test jerseys and we had them framed and I said to Laura [his wife], ‘I’m not putting them on the wall until the South African tour was over because I wanted the three tours together,’ but that’s life.
“Everyone has setbacks across all ways. You look at some lads, you look at someone of the calibre of Garry [Ringrose]. He’s 28 and he’s never been on a Lions’ tour, just with pure luck and injuries.
“I’ve been very lucky to go on two but you’ve got to take the motivation sometimes where you can.”
Gatland didn’t call Sexton to explain his decision at the time, but Sexton insists that he wouldn’t have expected any such contact.
“I don’t like players when they give out about not getting feedback,” he says. “You’ve got to go and look for feedback when you want, but the Lions is something that is an honour to get picked for and I didn’t get the honour, which is what was chosen.
“It shouldn’t need an explanation, it should just be an honour or not. So, no, there were no calls or talks.”
Sexton certainly comes across as being as motivated as ever. The fire hasn’t started to burn out at all. That’s good news for Ireland as they go in search of their first Six Nations title since 2018. Having made so much progress under Andy Farrell, this is the next step.
They will have to start well against the Welsh on Saturday in Cardiff, where many of the Irish players will experience playing in a full Principality Stadium for the first time. Ireland have worked with Farrell and performance coach Gary Keegan to prepare themselves for the cauldron-like atmosphere.
“It’s probably something that we learned from the French game [in Paris] last year, acknowledging what’s coming and just talking about it briefly,” says Sexton.
“We won’t put too much onus on it but I think last year, we went to Stade de France, it was their first game back with crowds post-Covid. I wasn’t playing but I was there in the stadium and the flags, everyone was in the stadium 20, 30 minutes before kick-off and it was like, ‘Wow.’
“I didn’t expect it to be like that and I’ve been around enough, played a lot of games there, so that’s walking out there and going, ‘This is different to what I expected’.
“So we’ve acknowledged it a bit more this week and talked about what mentality you have to have going into that, how calm you have to be, how much on the same page you need to be because you’re not going to be able to hear the guy next to you.
“Sometimes you see someone make a simple mistake, it’s because he can’t hear the guy outside you. So it’s about staying calm enough to see it.”
There’s no one better than Sexton at spotting where the ball needs to go and when. This is set to be his last Six Nations in green so it’s one for all of us to enjoy.
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