Nick Cain column: No prizes for tact, but Eddie Jones was honest about Jonny Sexton

The attempt to bracket the Eddie Jones comments about Jonathan Sexton over the fitness of the Irish fly-half to play Test rugby as malevolent mind games is a distortion of what the England coach said.
One of the primary duties of care in professional Rugby Union, or amateur, is for the coaches and medical staff to act in the best interests of players who have been injured. If that means a coach not selecting players in order to protect them from themselves – mainly because some players are brave to the point of being foolhardy – then that is exactly what should happen.
In Sexton’s case there have been concerns that he is more susceptible to concussion following the Leinster and Ireland fly-half’s medical history. This includes suffering four concussions in a year, and being stood down for three months in 2014 in order to recover.
There was a scare just before the Six Nations when a relatively innocuous late collision in Leinster’s European Cup visit to Wasps saw Sexton replaced. The same happened in the draw against Wales in the opening round of the tournament when Sexton was taken off with a neck problem.
There was a further incident a fortnight ago which was given greater disciplinary scrutiny when Sexton was said to have suffered a “whiplash” injury as a result of the French lock Yoann Maestri giving the fly-half a late shunt with his shoulder in the first quarter of the match in Paris. Towards the end of the second-half Sexton was again shepherded to the touchline, and afterwards Ireland coach Joe Schmidt complained about French roughhouse tactics.
The citing commissioner then proceeded to tie himself in verbal knots over Maestri’s action. On one hand he decided to issue a warning rather than cite Maestri for foul play, yet on the other he said his actions, “fell just short of warranting a red card”.
Anyone who looks back at the video would conclude that the commissioner was trying to mollify Irish sensitivities because at no stage was it anything more than a yellow card. The barge was late and deliberate but carried considerably less impact than most of the tackles in the match.
Jones is right: international rugby is not netball. It is a game which has always included and embraced heavy-duty physical contact, and within that licence key players have always been targeted by their opponents.
Any attempt to sanitise the physicality allowed for within the laws of the game should be booted into touch. Gamesmanship or attempts to intimidate, like Maestri’s, should earn the perpetrator a stern warning or sin-binning. In the pro era foul play outside the laws of the game is invariably punished, with the tariff dependent on the severity of the offending player’s actions – although uniformity of sanctions needs to improve.
However, one of the main burdens of responsibility for safety falls on those responsible for selecting a player with a history of recurrent injury, with concussion at the top of the list. Coaches and medical staff must be satisfied he is fully fit. What is absolutely essential is that the onus of responsibility should not be shifted from them to those he is picked to play against.
Jones’close-to-the-bone comments about Sexton’s family being concerned for his safety were not tactful – but they were honest. No coach, or player, wants his team-mates throttling back because one of the opposition stars, or key tacticians, is being touted by his own team as deserving special protection from match officials because of prior injuries.
Having been present at Schmidt’s Press conference in Paris, my sense was that the tenor of the Irish coach’s comments was that his team had not been protected well enough.
What Jones was asking was whether, given Schmidt’s detailing of Sexton’s injuries, the fly-half is as fit for international rugby as he needs to be. Jones employed the following logic: “I would just be worried about his welfare if Sexton has had whiplash injuries. You don’t like to see that with any player, and if you are saying a guy has had whiplash then he has had severe trauma, and you have to worry about the welfare of the player.”
Sexton became involved in the exchange claiming that Jones was “jumping on the bandwagon about head injuries”. He said that it was frustrating being labelled with being concussed “when you are not” and stated that he had been “branded”.
The Irish No.10 added: “If I said over and over again that a member of the media had dementia, I would be sued. It’s not ideal.”
It is unlikely to end the argument, but Sexton can rest assured that most of us in the rugby media have had much worse said about us on social or comment forums (usually unattributable), and to my knowledge no legal action has been taken. The prevailing view is that it’s one of the hazards of the trade.