‘THREE WINS, YOU can’t ask for more than that,” says Jonathan Sexton.
He means it in the literal sense. ‘You’ being the press that gathered to hear his thoughts before he boarded a plane to Paris yesterday.
He and head coach Joe Schmidt, however, will ask for more than that. They always do.
“Look, it’s great we’re talking about all of these deficiencies in our play after three wins. It’s a nice place to be and a good thing that we’re doing it.
“We’d probably be talking about the same things if we’d have lost. It’s what we’ll do when we meet to review it, we’ll pretend like we did lose and take everything as it was.”
With a Six Nations Championship and four wins over three of the Rugby Championship teams bringing Ireland to nine wins out of 10 in 2014, there is no shortage of optimism surrounding Irish rugby at present. Within the squad, however, there is a concerted effort to stay grounded and focus attention on areas that need improvement.
While Ireland’s victories over the Springboks and the Wallabies were hugely impressive and had more than a fair share of excitement, they were perhaps lacking a wow factor that comes with fluid passing and swift attacking moves. Against high quality opposition it will always be difficult to put you best attacking foot forward, but even so, a little more control in attack would have made it a lot easier for fingernails across the island.
“They were great victories,” Sexton admits. “From an effort point of view, couldn’t have asked for more and from a courage point of view. But, look, we’re judged on our performances by Joe and there will be plenty of stuff we have to work on.”
He added: “We know in terms of our work off set-piece and stuff like that, how we launch the game and put teams under pressure when we have the ball is something that is obviously Joe’s strength and the players’ strength but we didn’t do it as well as we could have over the three weeks.”
Time alone may well be enough to solve certain problems in the backline. After a decade-old midfield partnership came to an end, introducing new faces outside Sexton could never have been seamless. Yet despite all the victory and fresh faces, there is an oddly bittersweet feel to the end of Ireland’s international year.
A little like Sexton’s individual achievement of being nominated as the World Rugby player of the year (the only player from the northern hemisphere on the five-man shortlist), Ireland can take pride from their move from seventh in the world to three. Yet when you’re so close to the top, nothing short of winning will do.
“I suppose we can just park it now; we can draw a line under 2014, be happy with what we achieved, but know that we could have done more performance-wise.
“Many of us felt we probably left a Grand Slam behind because we had the winnings of that match in Twickenham and we’re going to have go again in the Six Nations and try and do it all over again.”
Sexton is confident that under Schmidt, this national team can maintain the rate of progress we have witnessed over the past 13 months. Plateau is a dirty word in the big run up towards a World Cup, which is why this group still wear their, increasingly rare, defeats around their neck.
“I suppose the big learning from New Zealand,” the 29-year-old says as if the defeat came yesterday rather than 366 days ago.
“That last seven minutes, how we could do things differently, and it was probably the worst video session you could imagine. We had to relive that seven minutes again and the defensive errors that we made.
“We learned from them. We didn’t do the same thing against Australia when they had us under pressure in those last few minutes, we didn’t make the system errors and we stayed patient and then we got the turnover when we had to.
“So from that regard, yeah we’d still like to go back and play that seven minutes against New Zealand again, but I’m sure we’ll face them over that World Cup campaign.”
2015, a very big year.
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