It might be possible – if you happened to have a lot of time on your hands – to create your own starting XV using the autobiographies of Ireland rugby players who’ve retired during the past decade-and-a-bit. Brian O’Driscoll has written one. And, from a cursory look at my bookshelves, so have Ronan O’Gara, Paul O’Connell, Rory Best, Keith Earls, Donncha O’Callaghan, Peter Stringer, Seán O’Brien, Mike Ross, Jamie Heaslip, Rob Kearney and Geordan Murphy. Eddie O’Sullivan and Joe Schmidt covered a lot of the same ground in their books too.
You’d be forgiven for believing that the story of Irish rugby this millennium, encompassing Grand Slams, European Cups, historic victories over the All Blacks and inevitable World Cup quarter-final defeats, has been well and truly told, at least as far as the sporting memoir goes.
But Johnny Sexton’s account of those years was always going to be worth reading for the unique perspective he brings to the subject. The former World Player of the Year and record Irish points-scorer tends to see things differently to others, which is basically the leitmotif of this frank and revealing autobiography.
The Sexton who emerges from these pages is an intense, pugnacious character – “poor standards in any form should not be tolerated” – who was forever at war with opponents, coaches, team-mates, referees, teachers and, most vitally, himself. Late in his career, he reveals, his obsession with winning, referenced in the title, pushed his nervous system right to the brink. After developing irritable bowel syndrome, he was ordered by a doctor to change the way he managed his stress. The thought of Sexton performing mindfulness exercises will bring a smile to the reader just as it clearly did to the author.
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The Irish sportsman Sexton is most popularly compared to is Roy Keane and it comes as no surprise to discover that Keane was his childhood hero. Interestingly, their origin stories are similar. They were both “discovered” at a time of life when they could have been forgiven for believing their chance had passed.
Keane was playing for Cobh Ramblers in the League of Ireland while closing in on his 19th birthday. Sexton was a schools rugby star who seemed to hit a wall after he left St Mary’s and found himself part of Leinster’s “sub-academy”, whatever Purgatorial nightmare that might be for a young player with big ambitions. At the age of 23, he was lining out for St Mary’s in the All-Ireland League, still uncapped by Ireland, and was Leinster’s third-choice outhalf. Around this time, we discover, his agent offered his services to Munster. They politely declined.
Sexton was almost alone in believing that he would become the player he did, kicking Leinster to four European Cups and Ireland to four Six Nations Championships. The determination to prove the doubters wrong doesn’t alone explain Sexton’s famously chippy character.
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.
“It was different with Mum, who used to get emotional, according to my naive view of the world,” he writes. “Your mum was supposed to be the one who provides you with emotional support, not the one who needs support herself. So I was often impatient with her.”
He talks about staying late in school to avoid going home, or having dinner in the home of Laura Priestly, his childhood sweetheart, now wife and the mother of their three children, who emerges from the book as his north, south, east and west.
Back then, he was Jonno to his friends and Jonathan to everyone else, except his uncle Willie, the former Munster and Ireland flanker, who nicknamed him Worry Wart because he always seemed to have the woes of the world on his shoulders. No one called him Johnny until he encountered Michael Cheika, the genial Aussie and former Leinster coach, who finally gave him his big break, throwing him on as a substitute for the injured Felipe Contepomi in a European Cup semi-final against his father’s beloved Munster. It was the day that Sexton famously announced himself as Ireland’s next number 10 by roaring in the face of the man in possession.
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.”
There are many moments like this in the book. Sexton, who admits to both insecurity and grudge-bearing, appears to remember every single compliment, slight and dirty look (quite a few from O’Driscoll) during the course of his career, in the same way he remembers every match he ever played in blueprint detail.
Timing played such an important role in his transformation from “nobody” to the most decorated Irish rugby player of all time and the fallings-out were just as important a part of the story as the friendships he forged. He made an enemy of O’Gara just as he needed the impetus to push him for the Ireland number 10 jersey. He writes that he used to picture O’Gara’s face behind the goal as he lined up a kick and he’d aim for that.
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 Andy Farrell came along, having listened to Leo Cullen’s injunction to be a bit more understanding of players who didn’t share his – again, that word – obsession. For someone who couldn’t catch a break for the first part of his career, he then met all the right people at all the right times.
He shirks no tackles in the book. But – and this is most un-Keane-like – he holds up his hands to making a lot of mistakes. There’s regret over the way he conducted himself at times, especially his behaviour towards referee Jaco Peyper following Leinster’s defeat to O’Gara’s La Rochelle in the 2023 European final, when he wasn’t even part of the matchday squad.
He agrees with Cullen’s view of him as a “stubborn bollocks”, describes himself as an overthinker and admits to replaying moments from matches that are finished over and over in his mind. You can’t help but wonder – as with Keane – whether he enjoyed it at all, or whether highs were ever high enough to cancel out the lows. He says, for instance, that he felt “flat” after winning his fourth European Cup against Racing 92 in 2018 because it was a poor match that was decided by kicks.
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.
Sexton talks frankly about concussion, an issue with which he is more than familiar, and which had England coach Eddie Jones, among others, publicly questioning whether he was borrowing against his future health by playing on for as long as he did.
He relives the drama of all the heroic moments from his career – from the 40m injury-time drop-goal in Paris that kick-started Ireland’s Grand Slam campaign in 2018 to his half-time team talk that inspired Leinster to a stunning comeback victory over Northampton in the 2011 European final.
We get an insider’s account of all those World Cups in which Ireland came up disappointingly short and we find out what Rieko Ioane said to make him so mad after Ireland’s defeat by the All Blacks in last year’s tournament (spoiler alert: it was “Enjoy your retirement, you c**t.”)
With so much experience and so much insight to offer, it’s a genuine surprise to discover that, at least at the time of writing, Sexton was considering walking away from the game, with no immediate plans to go into coaching or even punditry. For the last two years of his career, he was training for a job with the Ardagh Group, “a global supplier in sustainable glass and metal packaging”. His legendary hunger for battle is now sated by regular games of Padel, which, interestingly, is expected to become an Olympic sport in 2032. The chances are that he already knows this.
Obsessed is that all-too-rare thing – a sports book befitting of the career it describes. Sexton spills his guts out on these pages like he spilt them out on the pitch. It belongs on the top shelf of the best Irish sports books ever written.
Paul Howard is a former sportswriter, the creator of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly and the ghostwriter of The Rodfather, the autobiography of Roddy Collins.
Further reading
Back from the Brink: The Autobiography by Paul McGrath (Century, 2006)
Paul McGrath is arguably Ireland’s best – but unquestionably most beloved – footballer. In his life story, written with journalist Vincent Hogan, he reveals the full extent of his struggles with alcohol during and after his career. Along with Andre Agassi’s Open, this book set the bar for what a sports autobiography should be.
In Sunshine or In Shadow by Donald McCrae (Simon & Schuster UK, 2019)
McCrae – a two-time winner of the prestigious William Hill Sports Book of the Year award – tells the story of how boxing delivered hope during the Troubles through the stories of Charlie Nash, Gerry Storey, Barry McGuigan, Hugh Russell and Davy Larmour.
Fight or Flight: My Life, My Choices by Keith Earls (Reach Sport, 2021)
In this hugely courageous autobiography, ghosted by journalist Tommy Conlon, the former Munster and Ireland star opens up about the mental health struggles that he kept secret even from his closest team-mates.
