Keith Wood Names Ireland’s Johnny Sexton Successor
Ireland legend Keith Wood has had his say on who will replace Johnny Sexton as Ireland’s fly-half ahead of the upcoming Six Nations.
The former Munster and Harlequins hooker took us through the top prospects to be Ireland’s next great 10. Wood, who represented the British & Irish Lions on two tours, has also revealed what it was like to be part of the Living With Lions documentary after the recent release of the Six Nations: Full Contact documentary on Netflix.
Jack Crowley is Johnny Sexton’s Successor as Ireland Fly-Half
It’s Jack Crowley I think. You have the two Byrne brothers, Ross and Harry, you have Ciaran Frawley and Sam Prendergast.
The Byrnes and Frawley have injuries. Crowley is playing well. He is hard and robust and he is a very interesting fly-half. I would have him there.
I think we will see Prendergast play during the Six Nations. But it is very early for him. He is an outrageous talent at 10. He is incredibly unflappable.
*Ireland are the 6/4 second favourites for the 2024 Six Nations according to the latest rugby odds at BoyleSports.
Rugby is harder now than in my day
I don’t listen to any of the people who say people are trying to make the game soft. It is so not soft.
I’m happy to say it is so much harder than it was in my day.
‘Living with Lions’ highlighted how dangerous rugby is and Unfair The Sport Is
I watched the video a couple of times since then. For me, the pieces that resonated were all the bits you don’t see yourself when you’re there. For instance when Will Greenwood was knocked out and Martin Johnson was being stitched.
Anybody that thinks that playing sport is easy gets disabused of that very quickly with that video. You can see how hard it is. You can see how dangerous it is. You can see the toll it takes on everybody and then you can see the joy when victory happens.
But also what stands out was how fine that line was.
If Jeremy [Guscott] missed the drop goal, maybe we would lose that match. I don’t think we were fit enough to win the last match, no matter what happened.
Sport is inherently unfair. One person not doing something could mean that that team is a team of losers. That’s why you always have to celebrate a team that wins. No matter who they are, they go through so much to do it.
But when you get to the Lions it is quite gladiatorial. It’s four countries coming as one.
In the bigger picture we were told this could be the last Lions tour; that the whole concept was very vulnerable, that now in this new professional world, this was something that may not be considered to be important.
I didn’t like the last Lions tour in 2021 for the reason that there were no supporters. A Lions tour is entirely about that. It’s like a modern migration. Once every four years.
*Australia, who the British & Irish Lions tour in 2025, are 7/1 to win the 2027 Rugby World Cup according to the latest rugby betting odds at BoyleSports.
Living with Lions was a huge gamble – nothing was staged or set up
They were a really small production company. And they pretty much put their lives on the line for us.
They paid for rights that they couldn’t really afford. They did it because they wanted to do it. The producer was called Duncan Humphreys and I think he had worked on shows like Dempsey and Makepeace about two New York detectives.
We had a conversation about it. And what they basically said to us all is we’re here. And we will never ask you a question. And that’s what it was like. Nothing was staged or set up.
They gave a couple of cameras to some of the guys such as John Bentley and Doddie Weir. They asked me and I said no!
It was so natural to have the producers and their cameras there
What I loved about them was that we never noticed them. They blended in immediately and actually became part of the team, even to the point of where you go with somewhere for dinner, and you go to pay the bill, and you suddenly realise that the bill has been paid for.
It’s incredible. When you look back at the access that there was nowhere they couldn’t go. They asked to come into the changing room, which I’m not a fan of. I’ve never liked having cameras in the changing room. I think it’s a fairly sacrosanct place.
I would never want to be giving over anything to anybody else, that they would see what you do in the change room.
But we did let them in and they did it in such a way as to be totally unobtrusive. It felt like they were they felt like they were a part of the squad. That’s a fairly cherished place to be. The only way to describe it is they were part of the squad.
In the making of it, nobody asked you what was going on? Nobody asked you, ‘What did you think about this?’ Nobody asked what your emotions were in the change room. It was an observational documentary.
They shot 173 hours of footage cut down to three hours. Duncan and his team worked as hard as we did. I think they went into hock for it. They could have lost their shirts on us.
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