The Unlikely Lion

Johnny Sexton wasn’t on the path to stardom as a teenager and no one predicted he would make it as far as he has. That glimpse at the real world has helped make him the player he is writes Malachy Clerkin.

Johnny Sexton had to wait a while to become a professional rugby player. He was no boy prodigy. In the hothouse of schools rugby in and around the comfortable suburbs of Dublin, it never takes much for a name to pop up and for local sages to rush to be the first to show they can pick one. Nobody risked their reputation putting Sexton’s name up as one to watch.

In fact – and this makes him one of a dying breed in modern sport – Sexton was actually a civilian for a while.

As a 19-year-old, he went to college to do chemical engineering but dropped out after only a few months. While younger players than him went straight to the Leinster academy, Sexton melted into the real world for a while and got a job as a gofer in a finance company.

He played club rugby for St Mary’s in his spare time. We’re not talking about the dark ages here – this was in 2005.

“It was training Tuesday and Thursday with a game on Saturday,” he told me in 2011. “I had a year of that and I enjoyed it but I always wanted to play professionally. I suppose the best way to put it is that I wanted to be a professional but I was never professional about it. Not until I got into the academy.

“Mark McDermott, the Irish Under 21 coach, saw me playing for Mary’s one day when he came to see another guy play.

“I’m fairly sure he wasn’t there to see me. But he took me into the Under 21 squad and through that I got into the Leinster academy. I had been sort of talking to them anyway and they’d said I was on their radar.

“I gave it a crack then and it’s gone well since but when I think about it now, I know that I came to it way behind where I should have been. I was looking at lads who were professional since they were 16. Whereas I just wasn’t in a professional frame of mind myself.”