IT’S 13 YEARS since Johnny Sexton first played against South Africa. Croke Park, 2009. Earning just his second Test cap, the out-half kicked all of Ireland’s points in a 15-10 win.

“I remember the fog,” Sexton recalled during his midweek press duties yesterday. “I remember lining up a shot at goal and you could barely see the posts.

“It’s mad to think I’m still going but that’s all I remember from that game really. I remember obviously being very nervous. I remember looking at guys like Victor Matfield and going, ‘Do I belong on this pitch?’ I was very new to the stage, but I loved it and it gave me the drive to go on and play more games for Ireland.”

Much has changed since, but as Sexton highlighted, much also remains the same.

“That was a very similar fixture to this,” he added.

“They were coming as world champions, just after a Lions tour and having won that. It’s almost the identical fixture 13 years on.”

Yet this time around Ireland find themselves slapped with the target of being the top-ranked side in the world.

Andy Farrell wants his team to ‘embrace’ that high billing, but the players have appeared quick to play it down. The way they see it, actions speak louder than stats. That’s why they want to go full-throttle against a stacked Springboks side this weekend. It’s why Farrell is giving players like Josh van der Flier and Jamison Gibson-Park every chance to prove their fitness ahead of Saturday’s Lansdowne Road showdown. 

“Every Test match you play, you want to win,” Sexton continued.

Sexton won his second Test cap against South Africa in 2009. Dan Sheridan / INPHO Dan Sheridan / INPHO / INPHO

“That goes without saying. How you do it is the most important thing and that’s… You’ve got to play well, you’ve got to go out and try score tries against a pretty tough defensive team, a team that comes off the line higher and a team that tries to make life as difficult as possible for you to put you under big pressure.

“So, it will be a very different test to what we had in the summer (in New Zealand). You know, obviously we referred to the summer series as the biggest test you can face in rugby. It is in many ways. But it is a different test coming this Saturday.

If we want to do special things over the next 18 months we’ve got to beat different teams playing different games and they are very different to New Zealand. They are almost unique. They are the nearest team to England maybe in terms of how they play. It will be tough.”

It should be a fascinating clash of styles. The reigning world champions bring a physicality Ireland rarely encounter. The home side will look to match that where necessary while also adding new layers to their own distinctive style which delivered in such impressive fashion in New Zealand.

“It’s trying to implement our game-plan and try play as quick as we can. How we do that is with good set-piece, good ruck. Physicality is going to be a big part of the game, like it is for every game. But we’ll play… It could be teeming down rain, it could be windy, so we might have to play an arm-wrestle against them, you just don’t know. We’ll do what the game dictates and what the conditions dictates, what the ref dictates.

“We have to be open-minded enough to be able to do a bit of everything I think.”

It’s been five years since Ireland last faced South Africa, but they’ll become more familiar foes over the coming 12 months, with the two sides also set to face off in the pool stages of next year’s World Cup.

Sexton during Ireland training on Turesday. Billy Stickland / INPHO Billy Stickland / INPHO / INPHO

That tournament is already occupying minds out at the IRFU’s high performance centre. Ireland have been here before; ranked top in late 2018 only to crash and burn at the 2019 World Cup. They know they are in a good place at the moment, but that more will be required if they are to achieve something special in France next year.

“Yeah, you’ve got to keep evolving, you’ve got to keep getting better. If you stay the same, other teams will pass you out.

“And you know, we need to build a real competition for places and so no one can get comfortable and that is exactly what the coaches are doing. They’re challenging us in how we play the game, they’re challenging us by putting all these fixtures in, with the Emerging Ireland tour, the Maori games (on the summer tour), now the New Zealand A game (this week), all these guys are getting chances to impress the coaches and to play under the coaches and to put what the coaches want out on the pitch.

That’s going to create, whatever, there were 50 players out at training today and I was thinking to myself that 20 of them are going to be left at home for the World Cup, and I couldn’t pick who is going to be left at home. There are going to be some good players left out but that’s exactly where we want to be and keep cultivating. So those are the lessons we learnt that we’re implementing.

“You don’t need 32 players (for a World Cup squad), you need 42 because there are going to be five or six… In the 2015 World Cup, we had an unbelievable team, we had a great draw, everything set up for us, won the pool, and then we lost seven players in the space of a week and we weren’t able to survive like.

“We probably had 23 or 24 good players, but we didn’t have the big… When you look at France they have 80 good players, 80 players that are ready to go to the World Cup, they have amazing strength in depth, and with a much smaller resource pool, we’ve got to keep building that and that’s why Andy and the coaches have done what they’re doing.”

Less than a year out from the World Cup, Farrell’s work has brought Sexton and Co back to the top of the rankings. This weekend is a chance to prove they belong there. 

“You want to test yourself, and this is up there with the biggest test you can have in international rugby,” Sexton added. “The world champions at home, full house, pressure on.”

Just the way they want it.

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