Paul Howard hails a frank and revealing book that achieves the rare feat of being worthy of the brilliant career that preceded it
Paul Howard hails a frank and revealing book that achieves the rare feat of being worthy of the exceptional career that preceded it
The breakdown of his mother and father’s marriage seems to have been a hugely formative experience on him as a teenager. His parents stayed together, he writes, because they couldn’t afford to divorce with four children in private school. With admirable candour, he admits that he took the side of his Kerryman father, with whom he’d bonded through their shared love of sport.
We get a full account of his beef with O’Gara, starting with Sexton’s comments in a Sunday Independent interview to the effect that he was coming to knock the top man off his perch. Later, in a training ground bust-up, Sexton pretended to throw a punch at him, then called him a coward when he winced, which provoked the Ireland outhalf to tell him, “You’re useless – a nobody.”
He wasn’t sure if Cheika rated him, but that was just what he needed at that time of his career. Schmidt adored him – “your real dad” his team-mates used to joke – but he overlooked him for the Ireland captaincy after O’Connell retired, which hurt, Sexton admits. But then he was much more ready for it by the time’s injunction to be a bit more understanding of players who didn’t share his – again, that word – obsession.
Obsessed is a big book, but there is so much packed into its just-shy-of-400 pages. His collaborator, Sunday Times journalist Peter O’Reilly, has done an excellent job in drawing the stories from him and presenting them in a way that keeps the pages turning., among others, publicly questioning whether he was borrowing against his future health by playing on for as long as he did.
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