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Johnny Sexton becomes joint-leading points scorer in Six Nations history
By PA
Ireland captain Johnny Sexton became the joint-leading points scorer in Guinness Six Nations history during Sunday’s clash with Scotland.
The 37-year-old moved level with Ronan O’Gara’s total of 557 after kicking a penalty and two conversions at Murrayfield.
Having made his championship debut in 2010, fly-half Sexton travelled to Edinburgh seven points shy of former international team-mate O’Gara.
He achieved the feat in the 62nd minute of his 59th appearance in the tournament before being replaced by Ross Byrne nine minutes later.
The 2018 world player of the year leapfrogged ex-England star Jonny Wilkinson (546) into second place in the overall standings during last month’s win over France before sitting out his county’s round-three trip to Italy with a groin injury.
England skipper Owen Farrell is the second-highest active player, sitting in fourth spot overall on 517.
Sexton will hope to take the outright record in next weekend’s Dublin clash with England.
Speaking about the record before the game, he said: “It’s not something I ever set out to do.
“I’d rather not score another point and win a championship, win a Grand Slam than get the points record.
“If it comes, fantastic, but it’s not something I lose sleep over.
“If you do it, it’s an amazing mark to do. Ronan obviously had an amazing career and even just to be in that same conversation is enough for me.”
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Like I've said before about your idea (actually it might have been something to do with mine, I can't remember), I like that teams will a small sustainable league focus can gain the reward of more consistent CC involvement. I'd really like the most consistent option available.
Thing is, I think rugby can do better than footballs version. I think for instance I wanted everyone in it to think they can win it, where you're talking about the worst teams not giving up because they are so far off the pace we get really bad scoreline when that and giving up to concentrate on the league is happening together.
So I really like that you could have a way to remedy that, but personally I would want my model to not need that crutch. Some of this is the same problem that football has. I really like the landscape in both the URC and Prem, but Ireland with Leinster specifically, and France, are a problem IMO. In football this has turned CL pool stages in to simply cash cow fixtures for the also ran countries teams who just want to have a Real Madrid or ManC to lose to in their pool for that bumper revenue hit. It's always been a comp that had suffered for real interest until the knockouts as well (they might have changed it in recent years?).
You've got some great principles but I'm not sure it's going to deliver on that hard hitting impact right from the start without the best teams playing in it. I think you might need to think about the most minimal requirement/way/performance, a team needs to execute to stay in the Champions Cup as I was having some thougt about that earlier and had some theory I can't remember. First they could get entry by being a losing quarter finalist in the challenge, then putting all their eggs in the Champions pool play bucket in order to never finish last in their pool, all the while showing the same indifference to their league some show to EPCR rugby now, just to remain in champions. You extrapolate that out and is there ever likely to be more change to the champions cup that the bottom four sides rotate out each year for the 4 challenge teams? Are the leagues ever likely to have the sort of 'flux' required to see some variation? Even a good one like Englands.
I'd love to have a table at hand were you can see all the outcomes, and know how likely any of your top 12 teams are going break into Champions rubyg on th back it it are?
Go to commentsYou always get idiots who go overboard. What else is new? I ignore them. Why bother?
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