Ireland fly-half Johnny Sexton has said that he’s ‘unbelievably frustrated’ at how his team have performed in the Six Nations.
Ireland were battered by England in their opening game at Lansdowne Road before trudging their way past both Scotland and Italy.
Joe Schmidt’s side will welcome France to Dublin next weekend as they enter the penultimate round of the competition with everything still to play for and Sexton said that their preparation and training has mirrored last year’s competition where they went on to win their first Grand Slam since 2009.
“I’m unbelievably frustrated,” Sexton told Virgin Media One. “How can you not be when you’re doing as good a preparation as you were doing last year, you’re training as well you were doing last year, you’re doing everything right and things just aren’t clicking.
"Fucking catch the fucking ball." pic.twitter.com/epRsMGfAxE
— Murray Kinsella (@Murray_Kinsella) February 25, 2019
“Nobody cares more than us. That’s the bottom line. I’m sorry if I let my frustrations boil over at times but that’s just part of me.
“I care a lot about the team and wanting to do well. People are going to say you shouldn’t act frustrated when you’re coming off.
“But I wasn’t frustrated about coming off, I was frustrated because things didn’t go well for us again.
“I could come out with three or four excuses but we just have to say that we haven’t been good enough yet.
“We’ve shown glimpse in games of how good we can be and then we’ve just…we haven’t.”
Ireland internationals Andrew Trimble and Jenny Murphy said that they expect a couple of changes to be made for the visit of France and Murphy said that she would like to see Leinster centre Garry Ringrose brought back into the fold.
“Jordi Murphy, Ultan Dillane and Dave Kilcoyne,” said Trimble on the latest episode of Baz and Andrew’s House of Rugby before he touched on the midfield changes that Ireland were forced to make against Italy. Bundee Aki did not return to the field of play after a Head Injury Assessment in the first half, meaning Chris Farrell shifted inside a position and Keith Earls was drafted as outside centre.
“I’d imagine Aki would be cleared and good to go,” said Murphy, “and I thought Farrell had a decent game, given the amount of moving he had to do after coming back from a knee-knock.
“But, I’d say, if Ringrose is fit, he would come back and slot into that 13 position.”
