Johnny Sexton ready to ride to Ireland’s rescue once again

Johnny rides to the rescue again. As was the case after the Lions' first Test in New Zealand in 2017, or Ireland's first Test in Australia in 2018, and many other occasions besides, Ireland will look to their talismanic World Player of the Year to revive their damaged Rugby World Cup campaign.

Reflect on the Lions’ coming back to draw the series in New Zealand, not to mention winning the series in Australia four years before, that comeback series win in Australia, the Grand Slam and two other Six Nations titles, the wins over New Zealand, Leinster’s four Heineken Cups, and the one common ingredient has been the 34-year-old outhalf.

The dependency on him shows no signs of abating, and with Ireland having less wriggle room following the dispiriting and damaging defeat by Japan, Sexton is expected to return, with either Peter O'Mahony or himself as captain, in what will surely be a much changed Irish side for Thursday's game against Russia in Kobe Stadium (kick-off 11.15am Irish time).

There seemed few positives to be taken from the 19-12 defeat by the hosts which means Ireland can no longer be assured of winning the pool, albeit qualification for the quarter-finals is still within their own control if they beat Russia and Samoa with bonus points. But Sexton managed to find one.

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Lamenting the uncharacteristic inaccuracies in the performance, Sexton noted: “I suppose the only blessing in disguise is that, in the last two World Cups that I’ve been involved in, we’ve not cruised through the group, but we’ve had everything go our way in the pool stages. And then we’ve had the day that we had yesterday in a quarter-final and we’d be going home today.

“The great thing now is that we’ve got the rest of the pool to get things together. We know, to a certain extent, that we’ve got things in our own hands in terms of if we can win the last two games and score a number of tries we can definitely qualify for the quarter-final.

“If that’s in first or second place, that’s out of our control, so we won’t worry about that. That’s done now. So it’s up to us now to put in two big performances and hopefully put ourselves into a quarter-final and, we know if we do that, then we’ve got a chance.”

Sexton, not surprisingly, admitted that watching is frustrating for him even when his side are going well, but his inability to help out was compounded by the way the game unfolded.

“One thing about this team is that we back the squad, the 31 guys. When we picked the squad, we said that everyone that was here was ready to play. I picked up that (quad) strain against Scotland and I wasn’t going to train Monday, Tuesday. The preparation time is so short in a six-day turnaround that the guys made a decision for me to sit this one out.

“You want to play every game, especially in a World Cup, but hopefully I can pay back the whole squad with a good performance this week and beyond.”

The five-day turnaround for the Russian game meant Ireland conducted their review soon after arrival in Kobe on Sunday morning, and in analysing what went wrong, Sextons said: “It wasn’t one thing. Discipline was obviously a big thing that we don’t normally do. Any marginal decisions, we seemed to be on the wrong side of them, which is fine.”

“We looked at those penalties today, penalties we gave away, and we’ve got to look at ourselves and say our discipline wasn’t good enough.

“There’s a lot of access points we gave them, discipline would be top of the list. We had them under pressure a couple of times and we let them out. We didn’t exit a couple of times as well as we should, so there’s one or two things in each department that added up, and you have to give a very good team like Japan a lot of credit on the day as well.

“I thought the boys started really well to go 12-3 up you couldn’t ask for much more in the first 25 minutes but then those errors just crept in.”

As the Japan coach Jamie Joseph noted afterwards, the hosts were building towards their game against Ireland for over two years, whereas Ireland had been doing so for six days.

Asked if the emphasis on the opening game against Ireland had detracted from the preparations for Japan, Sexton said: “That’s true in terms of that we took the Scotland game so seriously we prepared for it for the guts of two weeks and we didn’t look forward at all. That was the respect we showed to Scotland.

“We prepared really well for the Japan game as well, just on the day we didn’t do the small things that we spoke about already. We didn’t do them well enough and that’s the game. We had lots of access points at 12-3 where we could have scored again and we let them off the hook to a certain extent.

“If we score then, it can be a totally different game. Lots of small things to fix up on but we’ve got two games now that we need to really throw ourselves into and hopefully get into a quarter-final.”

Bouncebackability? Sexton also draws on previous examples of Ireland rebounding from defeats.

“Yeah, we have responded really well, in terms of the other setbacks. At the start of the Six Nations we turned things around. We had a really good performance against France.

“Things went bad against England,” said Sexton in reference to Ireland’s 57-15 warm-up defeat by England. “We turned it around and beat Wales back-to-back who are, I think, 24-8 up against Australia,” he added, speaking at the half-way point in Wales’ entertaining win over the Wallabies.

“So they’re a very good team and we beat them. We started with a bang last week against Scotland so yeah, if we can go on a bit of a run now, a five-game winning run would be great. That would do nicely.”