Johnny Sexton admits Ireland will have to manage their emotions this weekend in CJ Stander’s final Guinness Six Nations appearance against England in Dublin.
The No.8 celebrated his 50th cap away to Scotland and is set to retire from rugby at the end of the season.
That makes the clash with England a final swansong in the Championship for Stander, and Sexton is aware of just how important it is to not get carried away with the sense of occasion.
He said: “Sometimes you can have these big send-offs or big occasions. If it’s a 50th or a 100th cap or something. It can get to guys and the emotion can be too much. You’ve got to harness it in the right way.
“Ultimately, that emotion is good for five, six minutes, and then it’s just about who plays the best in the game. It’s something that you can use, but you’ve got to use it in the right way.
“Ultimately, it will come down to the detail in or around key areas of the game like discipline, set piece. Making the most of your opportunities, taking your chances. That’s where it will be won or lost.
“You can create your own energy within the group and you can create your own atmosphere. We miss the crowd, you can’t get away from that.
“It’s essentially a neutral venue and it was a neutral venue for us over in the Millennium and in Rome. It was a neutral venue against Scotland so it’s just a neutral venue.
“It makes it harder for us obviously because you don’t get the home advantage, but like I said with CJ’s last game, you can build your own atmosphere and we know England are very good at that.
“They’re very good at creating noise in their team and we’re going to have to… not match them there because we don’t have the same type of that stuff in our game, but we can create a good atmosphere during the week.”
Ireland come into the game off the back of successive wins away to Italy and Scotland, with the latter coming thanks to a late Sexton penalty.
They had led 24-10 at one point in the second half, only for Scotland to draw level with two converted tries. That followed similar dominance in the first half which was not capitalised upon.
And while Sexton is confident heading into the England game, he knows there are lessons to be learned from the win in Scotland.
He added: “We’re very confident. We were confident going into last week. We started the game brilliantly.
“You could see that confidence wasn’t an issue, but we made some errors. We didn’t exit well, they scored three points and then we obviously got a turnover. We didn’t use our turnover ball well enough at the weekend.
“That was the big learning for us. When you consider that great poach on the outside channel and then we get charged down, and we’re 10-8 down after having most of the game.
“There’s big learnings there for us this week. That’s something that popped up in this game, but there’s been different things in each game. We’ve just got to try and put it all together now.”
