[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”4″]T[/su_dropcap]he lockdown has given me a chance to catch up on some of the documentaries that have been sitting in my Watch Later pile and I’ve been particularly interested in two – All Or Nothing and Sunderland ‘Til I Die.

Content-wise, they’re both about soccer but context-wise, they couldn’t be more different. All Or Nothing is an all-access 8 part series on Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City side as they march towards a record-breaking Premier League title win.

Sunderland ‘Til I Die starts like it’s going to follow the same march to victory. Sunderland AFC are a big club with a big wage bill and a host of Premier League players and they’re odds on to bounce right back into the Premier League from the Championship at the start of the series but, instead, what plays out is a grim traipse from potential champions to relegation certs as the club’s best-laid plans fell apart week after week. What stood out to me was that all the people at the top of the club – bar the off-screen chairman – and the coaches, players, staff all seemed to be good people trying to do their best but small things kept undoing them. A PR incident here, an injury to a key player there and all of a sudden, results are in the tank. When you look deeper, you see the other issues; a manager that only began to look out of his depth when the rubber hit the road and no budget to help the manager they replaced him with (Chris Coleman) meant the whole collective kept spiralling inevitably towards disaster.

It’s an excellent lesson in the precariousness nature of sporting performance – you can have good people, good characters, hard workers behind the scenes and a rake of advantages but all it takes is one shot to an area you didn’t know was a critical weak spot to ruin all your best-laid plans. Think of it like the thermal exhaust port on the Death Star.

It’s the punch you don’t see coming that’s the hardest to roll with.

***

When we last looked at Leinster, they had won their third Heineken Cup in Joe Schmidt’s second season and, at the time, were only the second club to win it back to back.

They were favourites to win three in a row – they would have been the first to do that – but, even then, Joe Schmidt’s final season at Leinster ended up being a bit of a strange one.

It finished with two bits of silverware – a PRO12 win over Ulster in the RDS and an Amlin Challenge Cup – but was pockmarked by failing to get out of the pool stages for the first time in a number of years. It was the first time since 2007/2008 that the defending champions had failed to get out of the pool but, in context, it was a tight run thing.

Their reward for winning the tournament the previous season was a group with the Scarlets, a growing Exeter Chiefs side and a hugely motivated Clermont team that were (a) probably at the peak of their powers as a group and (b) still smarting after Leinster semi-final victory over them in the Heineken Cup the previous season.

Leinster would lose both games in the back-to-back series against Clermont that season but it was the failures to pick up bonus points at home to the Exeter Chiefs and away at the Scarlets that would really cost them.

This doesn’t just happen, though. Leinster were wracked with injuries to key players at key times during that season’s Heineken Cup pool.

Brian O’Driscoll – still a key part of Leinster’s side – missed the Clermont series through injury, which was particularly crucial in the away game where Leinster just fell short in a 15-12 loss in the Stade Marcel Michelin. Gordan D’Arcy missed the opening game against Exeter along with O’Brien. Luke Fitzgerald missed most of the season through injury, Rob Kearney missed the entire first half of the season and Sean O’Brien’s various niggles ensured he would pop in and out the squad all season.

Even then, Leinster’s squad as a whole was a little dilapidated at this point in Schmidt’s tenure, and to get a true picture of why we have to go back to the season before and look at Leinster’s pack.

Brad Thorn, like Rocky Elsom before him, came into the Leinster squad in 2011/12 and made a huge impact on the business end of the season. But there was a reason Leinster signed him outside of the fact that, even at 37, he was still an absolute freak that had played and won a World Cup final a few months prior – their second row was starting to look a little thin on top quality and had been since 2008/2009.

After winning their first Heineken Cup in 2008/09, Leinster set about patching the gaps in that position with Cullen and O’Kelly, in particular, being PRIORITY 2 and PRIORITY 1 replacements respectively.

Their first move was to sign Nathan Hines ahead of the 2009/10 season on a two-year deal and to say he was a roaring success would be an understatement. He had elite size, toughness and physicality and Leinster were all the better for it so, obviously, they were disappointed to lose him to Clermont in at the end of 2010/11. The frustration in Leinster was obvious – both they and Hines were looking to extend the deal but approval couldn’t be achieved at a price that would make it acceptable in the wider scheme of the IRFU’s development plans. This was a common theme in Irish rugby at this point. Only certain NIQ players in specific positions would be allowed to be contracted on a short term – season to season – basis and positions like tighthead, flyhalf and the second-row were pinch positions unless you had bloody good reasoning for why a signing or recontracting should be allowed, especially post World Cup where development of Irish qualified or potentially Irish qualified talent was a priority.

Leinster looked to get around that when it came to replacing the retiring O’Kelly and, almost more importantly, Nathan Hines ahead of 2011/12. They picked up Damien Browne, a Connacht born tighthead lock from Brive, and Steven Sykes, a highly rated South African second-row who was signed to a 3-year project player deal with an eye to balancing what Leinster needed now with what Ireland could potentially use in 2015.

Sykes came with a big reputation from the Sharks. A myriad of giant second rows – Bakkies Botha, Johann Mueller, Victor Matfield, Danie Rossouw – stood in his way for a Springbok cap and that was about the only reason why he had yet to be capped by March 2011, when his signing was announced. There was a fair bit of excitement about what the then 26-year-old could do for Leinster and, down the line, Ireland.

Unfortunately, Sykes would end up being a total bust and returned to South Africa after just three months and four senior appearances, throwing Leinster’s plans for the position into disarray in both the medium and short term.

That, along with an injury to Leo Cullen in early 2012, necessitated the short term signing of the then 36-year-old Brad Thorn in March 2012 and he started every one of Leinster’s knock out games in their Heineken Cup run.

Thorn left at the end of 2011/12 and that brings us up to the season we’re currently discussing – 2012/13. Leinster needed to recruit some size in the second row so Schmidt signed Tom Denton from Leeds in a squad role and Quinn Roux on an initial one-year project deal.

Roux didn’t play any Heineken Cup rugby that season but played a big role in the Challenge Cup run and earned a two-year extension off the back of his displays and that would put him into “project player” range.

Leinster’s senior second-row roster in 2012/13 certainly looked less imposing than when it had Hines and Thorn in it over the previous three seasons.

• Leo Cullen (c)
• Devin Toner
• Damian Browne
• Quinn Roux
• Mark Flanagan
• Tom Denton

At this stage, the club captain Leo Cullen was coming to the end of his career and was starting to show his age against the increased size and athleticism that was cropping up in French and English clubs at the time.

It should be noted that, as of 2012/13, the aforementioned English and French clubs, in particular, had really started to flex their muscles financially. Signing big-name players – even quality, established players – was becoming more expensive with every cycle of contracts. It was harder to hold onto the players you had come renewal time and, at that point in the IRFU cycle, there was a real need to refresh the national team post-2011 so getting dispensation for any signing had to have a benefit for the national team attached to it in the majority of cases, depending on a few key factors.

That environment meant that to find value, the Irish provinces were looking at players discarded or undervalued by their home union and offering them a route to test rugby. That approach allowed the provinces to find under the radar players with key skill or physicality traits that would allow them to (a) get a relatively quick fix for a position for relatively low money and (b) find easier approval from the IRFU.

This was the rationale behind the signing of Richardt Strauss, Stephen Sykes, Quinn Roux and the likes of Ben Te’o in later years.

***

In tandem with these issues in the second row – and with their other back row spot outside of Heaslip and O’Brien – Leinster were found living with Clermont’s physicality to be incredibly difficult and the slim margins that had seen them squeeze past ASM the season before were turned the other way.

To add to that general lack of grunt, three of Leinster’s primary six Foundation Players – O’Brien, Fitzgerald and Kearney – would large swathes of the season and crucial pool games in the Heineken Cup. At this stage, Kearney and O’Brien were disproportionally important to what Leinster wanted to do. Kearney was the best fullback in Europe at the time and O’Brien was a key physical game-changer for both Leinster and Ireland.

It would be fair to describe this season as “injury disrupted” for Leinster and their failure to exit the pool stages definitely reflects those injuries. That said, certain parts of Leinster’s senior squad were looking a little careworn by 2012/13.

Leo Cullen and Shane Jennings added a real hard edge to Leinster in 2008/09 but now, three seasons later, they were underpowered for the top end of European club rugby. Other players, like Kevin McLoughlin, had the size but just fell short of the international quality of Heaslip and O’Brien. That, in itself, isn’t a cardinal sin – especially in McLoughlin’s case, as he was a good European Cup tier player – but with Leinster’s relative lack of grunt and top-end quality in the second row, it started to become expensive.

As fate would have it, Munster would beat Leinster to the final “best runner up” spot on the last day of the pool stages and narrowly lose Clermont at the semi-final stage. Toulon would ultimately lift the European Cup this season, something they would repeat over the next two seasons.

This was the age of the big money, marquee signing and while Leinster ended Schmidt’s final season with silverware, the spectre of transition was looming large.

Schmidt was off to coach Ireland after his immense success with Leinster, Leinster’s totemic and iconic midfield pairing of O’Driscoll and D’Arcy were ageing quickly in a game that was getting bigger and more physical every year and, in January 2013, it was announced that Leinster’s key Foundation Player since 2009, Jonathan Sexton, would be leaving for Racing 92 at the end of the season.

***

This kind of thing didn’t really happen. Early in professionalism, a lot of Ireland’s top stars played abroad. That’s just how it was. But since the rise of Munster in the early 2000s and, it must be said, Keith Wood’s retirement in 2003, practically all of Ireland’s top players played in Ireland for the four provinces. There was the odd exception – Geordan Murphy – but even that was a distant memory by 2013. Sexton’s decision to leave for Paris to become the highest-paid player in the game at the time was a kick in the stones for Leinster and Ireland at the time.

There was no ready-made replacement for Sexton in Leinster or Ireland. Even O’Gara – his old sparring partner – had retired at the end of 2013 so there wasn’t even that comfort blanket to go for. Ireland couldn’t work without Sexton at the time and Schmidt certainly didn’t agree to coach the national side only to immediately lose his best player and tactical general on the field. Arrangements would have to be made with Racing for World Rugby mandated player release windows. It was far from ideal, but it would have to do.

Leinster, on the other hand, were left holding the bag.

Not only were they replacing Schmidt, but they would also now have to also replace Johnny Sexton, a man pivotal to their success and framework for play.

Matt O’Connor would be the man to take over from the most successful Leinster coach ever, signing on a three-year contract from Leicester Tigers.

O’Connor gets a lot of flak given how his tenure ended but Leinster’s reasoning behind this hire was sound. O’Connor was Leicester’s attack coach during their title wins of 2009 and 2010, he was head coach when Leicester won a Premiership title in 2012/13 and he would fill two spots for Leinster in Schmidt’s absence – attack coach and head coach.

Leinster had a decision to make when it was announced that Sexton would be leaving, especially with a new attack-dominant coach, was to either back the then 24-year-old Ian Madigan, Leinster’s young Irish qualified flyhalf who had racked up a tonne of PRO12 minutes and had made his test debut the season before, or go for a more experienced option. A decision was made to bring in the 29-year-old Kiwi Jimmy Gopperth from the Newcastle Falcons as a steady, experienced pair of hands to bridge the gap left by Sexton’s departure.

Schmidt was still in charge when Gopperth’s signing was announced and he said of Gopperth at the time;

“We are delighted that Jimmy has put pen to paper on a deal and we believe that he will be an excellent foil for Ian Madigan, bringing added depth and experience to the outhalf position when he joins this summer.

“Even though Newcastle have struggled in recent years, he has been a hugely consistent performer during his time in England where he won back-to-back Premiership Golden Boot awards.”

Depth, experience, and an excellent foil for Ian Madigan. At least it was in theory.

Madigan had a lot of talent and he was incredibly versatile – he could play #10, fullback (as he had for much of the previous season in Kearney’s absence) and he could fill in at #12 too – but most of his rugby as a starting #10 had been in CATEGORY 2/3 games over the previous few seasons and he was the very clear #2 to Sexton. In that context, Leinster had a clear choice with regards to their succession planning – would they move on from Sexton long-term and invest in Madigan? Or would they stall and wait for Sexton’s time in Paris to end?

When Sexton left at the end of 2012/13, Leinster would have been forgiven for making an assumption that his two-year deal in Paris would be just that, a two-year deal, and that they’d be in prime position to bring him back to Dublin in 2015/16 with heavy IRFU backing. In context, it was a solid assumption to make. The margins between Sexton staying and leaving were relatively small from a wage perspective and in the time between his move to Racing and his next contract, big senior earners like O’Driscoll, D’Arcy, O’Connell and others would likely be retired or outside the IRFU system in O’Connell’s case (at least pre-injury).

When I look at how the #10 jersey developed over 2013/14 and 2014/15 in Leinster, it seems very much like that Leinster made a decision to wait for Sexton, rather than make real moves to build on Madigan’s potential. Gopperth was initially signed as a steady pair of hands but he played the vast majority of big games for Leinster over the next two year period. Madigan’s versatility often saw him benching to cover #10/#12/#15 and that would only happen if there was a very clear decision by Leinster as an organisation – and not just Matt O’Connor on his own – to go in that direction.

By bridging Sexton’s two years away with a player who played in a similar style to Sexton, Leinster wouldn’t have to make radical changes to their gameplan when they were already in the midst of losing Schmidt, O’Driscoll, Cullen, D’Arcy, Jennings and Nacewa over the same period. Madigan was a different type of #10 to Sexton and Gopperth and, despite his obvious talents, Leinster would have to change quite a bit of their attacking structures if they were going to make Madigan their #1 guy and if Ireland were going to select Sexton while he was playing in France, then there was a barrier to prominence that Madigan would struggle to cross.

Even then, Leinster did relatively well in O’Connor’s two “Sextonless” seasons. They retained the PRO12 in his first season but ended up going out in the quarter-finals of Europe after an underwhelming pool topping campaign drew them away to Toulouse in the knockouts. Leinster were knocked out in the semi-final stage of Europe in O’Connor’s second season to eventual winners Toulon but finished fifth in the PRO12, losing to Munster home and away, and dropped disappointing home losses to the likes of the Dragons along the way.

Sure enough, Leinster would announce that Sexton would be returning to Leinster in September 2014 – after his first year in Racing – and Matt O’Connor would leave by mutual consent in May 2015 season with a year left on his deal.

A lot of the narrative in the aftermath of O’Connor’s time was that he left because he wouldn’t play young Leinster players. I’m not sure I agree with that statement.

If we go back to 2012/13, we can get a look at the absolutely insane Leinster academy class as it stood at the start of that season.

Leinster Academy List 2012/13:

Year One

Edward Byrne (Loosehead Prop) 1 – CURRENT LEINSTER SQUAD 1
Brian Byrne (Hooker) 1 – CURRENT LEINSTER SQUAD 2 
Gavin Thornbury (2nd Row) 1 – CURRENT CONNACHT CORE 1
Tadgh Beirne (2nd Row) 1 – CURRENT MUNSTER CORE 1
Dan Leavy (Flanker) 1 – CURRENT LEINSTER FOUNDATION PLAYER
Josh Van Der Flier (Openside Flanker) 1 – CURRENT LEINSTER FOUNDATION PLAYER
Jack Conan (Number Eight) 1 – CURRENT LEINSTER FOUNDATION PLAYER
Cathal Marsh (Out-half) 1 – PLAYING IN MLR

Year Two

James Tracey (Loosehead Prop) 2 – CURRENT LEINSTER SQUAD 1
Tadhg Furlong (Tighthead Prop) 2 – CURRENT LEINSTER FOUNDATION PLAYER
Martin Moore (Tighthead Prop) 2 – CURRENT ULSTER CORE 1
David Doyle (Hooker) 2 – N/A
Conor Gilsenan (Openside) 2 – LONDON IRISH
Jordan Coughlan (Back-row) 2 – LEICESTER TIGERS
Luke McGrath (Scrum-half) 2 – CURRENT LEINSTER CORE 1
Collie O’Shea (Centre) 2 – AIL
Michael Sherlock (Full-back) 2 – N/A
Andrew Boyle (Wing) 2 – N/A

Year Three

Jack O’Connell (Loosehead Prop) 3 – BRISTOL BEARS
Jordi Murphy (Back-row) 3 – CURRENT ULSTER CORE 1
Ben Marshall (2nd Row) 3 – RETIRED
Noel Reid (Out-half/Centre) 3 – LEICESTER TIGERS
Darren Hudson (Wing) 3 – AIL
Sam Coghlan Murray (Wing) 3 – AIL

Outside the Year 3 class – Jordi Murphy is the standout player from that group with Noel Reid behind him – that is an astonishing group of players. Fourteen out of the eighteen players in Year 1/2 in 2012/13 would go on to be professional players playing at a high level on the island of Ireland & UK. Four of that class would develop into what I would call Foundation Players for Leinster as they stand today and three of them are world-class talents, in my opinion – Furlong, Van Der Flier and Leavy. Jack Conan is a top player who is comfortably test-calibre and Luke McGrath is a core part of the Leinster squad with a rake of medals in his back pocket.

This kind of academy doesn’t just happen. There’s a bit of luck involved, sure. One guy getting an injury at a bad time can completely derail a potential top-end talent or getting a player in that might otherwise have picked another sport. This is true of all sporting development in all codes but around the turn of the decade, Leinster really got their academy production to where it needed to be.

Leinster have been singularly excellent in harnessing their natural advantages (population size, private school academies) with top-end coaching and assistance to young players and, even in 2013/14, it was producing top-class options.

But was O’Connor “holding them back”? Without being on the inside it’s impossible to say for sure, but the minutes these budding foundational talents had doesn’t stack up with a coach who was intent on stalling their development. Jack Conan saw big game time in O’Connor’s second season having been promoted to a senior deal after his second year in the academy and even featured in Europe.

Tadhg Furlong saw three senior starts and four bench appearances in Year Two of the academy during O’Connor’s first season and his third year in the academy, he saw 18 bench appearances and seven senior starts.

In fact, if we look at one of O’Connor’s lowest Leinster moments in his final season – a home loss to the Dragons during the Six Nations window – you can see O’Connor was backing the young talent (listed below in bold) at his disposal in a manner befitting their age and development at the time.

Leinster vs Dragons 2014/15

15: Dave Kearney (Senior player outside of test squad)
14: Fergus McFadden (Senior player outside of test squad)
13: Ben Te’o (Possible Project Signing)
12: Noel Reid (Luke Fitzgerald, 11 – Senior player outside test squad while recovering from injury)
11: Darragh Fanning
10: Jimmy Gopperth (NIQ signing)
9: Luke McGrath (John Cooney, 65)
1: Michael Bent (Senior player outside of test squad)
2: Richardt Strauss (Aaron Dundon, 3-7; 25)
3: Tadhg Furlong
4: Tom Denton (Mike McCarthy, 11 – Senior player outside test squad)
5: Kane Douglas (NIQ Signing)
6: Dominic Ryan (Senior player outside of test squad)
7: Shane Jennings CAPTAIN (Josh van der Flier, 65) (Senior player outside of test squad)
8: Jack Conan

REPLACEMENTS NOT USED: Peter Dooley, Jamie Hagan, Cathal Marsh.

A group of inexperienced players shipped a bad loss at home. It happens. O’Connor took the flak for it, though, as opposed to it being a product of the kind of underperformance that sometimes happens when you have young players alongside decent, experienced squad players that are just outside that test-calibre and, often, can be returning late in the week from the Irish camp for game-time.

Did anyone really expect a young Jack Conan to start ahead of the multi-capped, multiple Test Lion Jamie Heaslip? That only happened when Heaslip retired. O’Brien’s general unavailability for Leinster post-2015 was the biggest development factor in Van Der Flier and Leavy ascending as quickly as they did, in my opinion. Furlong was being brought through with the patience and considered game-time that you’d want for a guy that many people in Leinster were rightfully saying had world-class potential.

But regardless of the whys or wherefores, I think it was results, playstyle and, possibly, an ill-judged critique of the IRFU system that cost O’Connor in the end. I can sympathise with O’Connor’s point on the player management side of things, even if I can’t understand why he made those complaints public.

Schmidt’s Ireland leaned heavily on Leinster in the aftermath of Kidney’s reign, accelerating a process started by Kidney post-2011. That meant that O’Connor would often be without his top-calibre players during test windows where, if you’re not careful, you can ship damaging losses as you mix young players with relatively inexperienced squad players. O’Connor took a lot of the player development lumps in the time between Schmidt leaving and Cullen/Lancaster ascending to the top of Europe.

Leo Cullen learned a solid lesson during this time that you can never have too many experienced depth players during those windows because losses in October, February and March can have wide-ranging consequences.

O’Connor had a tough time managing the transition to a Leinster core at test level by the time he took over. It seems like a flawless process today but O’Connor was probably the first coach to lose anywhere from 18 to 20 senior players at different points during the season – even young players like Jordi Murphy/Marty Moore that he had helped to “develop” in his first season. O’Connor was left to put a PRO14 run together with inexperienced players and a “second layer” of Leinster players that were slightly below test-level.

I have some sympathy for O’Connor’s situation, especially in his second season that so damaged his perception. It also didn’t help that his senior players were still being coached at test-level by the exacting, heavily detailed focused man he replaced so there was an added difficulty to the gig before you ever get to the totemic players that would retire during his tenure.

It was always going to be difficult to replace the midfield partnership of O’Driscoll and D’Arcy regardless of what was happening in the #10 jersey and that played its part over his tenure. O’Connor dealt with the double retirement of Cullen and O’Driscoll after his first season by signing Kane Douglas and Ben Te’o.

Douglas was 24 years of age, a superb athlete and exactly the type of player that Leinster could expect to get two or three seasons out of, especially in tandem with Irish internationals Mike McCarthy (who’d signed from Connacht ahead of O’Connor’s first season) and Devin Toner, who had turned into a top-class second row in his later 20s.

But Douglas, like Sykes, and to an extent, Quinn Roux (albeit for different reasons), didn’t settle in Dublin and Leinster were forced to let him go at the end of his first season with two years left on his deal.

The second row was still an issue for Leinster in 2014/15, even after all these seasons. Their academy was incredibly productive at this point but no standout test-calibre prospect had yet to emerge there, as James Ryan was a few years out at this point. Signing McCarthy from Connacht had been an excellent bit of business though, as his physicality was comfortably test-standard and he was incredibly effective in that tighthead lock role. Leinster had hoped Roux would fill that spot in the team but he, for whatever reason, didn’t get on too well with O’Connor and spent half of his last year at Leinster on-loan to Connacht.

Kane Douglas’ agitating for a move home less than a year into his deal was a damaging one for O’Connor but despite the early release, Douglas rarely showed the kind of quality that had him top of Leinster’s shopping list after O’Connor’s first season.

Te’o’s signing was a big deal at the time, right after their PRO12 win in O’Connor’s first season. Leinster signed him directly from NRL to replace Brian O’Driscoll, and you could see why – he was big, athletic and had a mighty carry of the ball on him, as well the kind of offloading you’d expect from a league convert.

Leinster didn’t really have that kind of player in their midfield and Te’o was expected to be a bit of a game-changer. For a while, there was even talk of Te’o declaring for Ireland during his stay at Leinster (until his big-money move to Worcester put paid to that idea) but his signing was further proof that Leinster weren’t at all shy about filling gaps in their development with players from outside the province, even at the beginning of their academy era in 2014/2015.

Te’o (M), Douglas (L), Kirchner (W), Gopperth (10), Bent (THP), Roux (L), Boss (SH), Reddan (SH), Strauss (H), Cronin (H), Ross (THP), Denton (L), McCarthy (L) and even their primary blindside flanker by this point, Rhys Ruddock (signed from Ospreys after spending his formative years in Wales) played huge roles in their starting squad and depth chart. They also showed that Leinster weren’t a bit afraid to recruit from outside to augment their home-grown players or bridge a position until a homegrown alternative was available.

The IRFU/Leinster made a decision that O’Connor wasn’t the man to take Leinster forward as Sexton returned from Paris and O’Connor seemed to agree with them.

“I am disappointed and frustrated with our form in the Pro12 this season,” said O’Connor in a statement after his release.

“We set high standards for ourselves and for many reasons, we did not achieve those highs throughout the league this campaign.”

That brings us to the era right before today and the rise of the Leinster machine we’ve seen over the last three seasons. I’ll cover that – and Munster’s development from 2013/14 to 2015/16 – in the next part of this series but what can we learn about these “transition years”?

***

When Leinster have a development gap in a certain position, they have signed whoever they’ve needed to from whoever they needed to ensure they could compete at the top level.

There was no worries about being perceived as fielding a team of foreigners. There was no worry about being seen as Connacht +2. They were pragmatic. Rather than promoting whatever came out of their academy in the second row, regardless of quality, they waited for the right guys. Leinster could have promoted 23-year-old Mark Flanagan to a regular starting place in 2013/14. He was Leinster produced and a second row.

Instead, he was released, they went after Mike McCarthy and they were 100% correct in making that decision from an on-field success point of view.

This was true whenever Leinster looked at their second row at various points since 2009 and saw there were no viable academy prospects on the horizon, they went looking for project players, they raided Connacht (repeatedly) and signed NIQ players over and over and over again until they developed the right guy and had viable options in the academy to bolster him.

When there was no Leinster academy graduate ready to step in after Bernard Jackman, Leinster raided Connacht (again) for a former Munster player Connacht had developed and a project player in Richardt Strauss.

When they saw a gap developing at #9 around the turn of the decade, they raided Ulster for Isaac Boss and picked up Eoin Reddan, a former Munster player, from Wasps.

When Leinster struggled to find quality at tighthead, they signed CJ Van Der Linde, Stan Wright, Mike Ross (a former Munster player developed at Harlequins) and Michael Bent until they had the homegrown quality in place around 2013/14 to begin to move to entirely home-grown in that position.

When they lacked ball-carrying oomph in their midfield post-O’Driscoll and D’Arcy, they went after Ben Te’o first and then, when he moved on, they pursued Robbie Henshaw from Connacht until they got their man.

The lesson for Munster here is that Whatever Wins, Works and the losers can crib away like they always do anyway. Leinster were incredibly successful in blending excellently recruited foreign signings (project and NIQ), non-Leinster or non-Leinster developed Irish qualified players with their own home-grown academy players under the Leinster banner and then winning.

When the academy produced the right player; a James Ryan, rather than a Ross Molony, who’s a good player but he looks like he’s a guy who will end up being sub-test calibre – they invested and went all the way with that “right” player. This is true all the way through their recent history and their most recent transition post-2012.

The key isn’t having young players – every club has young players – it’s having high potential young players in a cluster, knowing when to cover their position with a non-Irish qualified player until their ready and, then, when they’re ready, let them have a free run at the position until they prove that they’re top quality or until you find someone better. Leinster have been extraordinarily good at that last part and it plays into the fifth point of squad building – continue to feed the squad with talented individuals and weed out lower-tier squad players whenever possible.

This is the plamás at the heart of squad management. You need top guys to win rugby matches against the best teams and every coach is looking to replace anyone who’s not a top player with someone who either is a top player or could be a top player.

But there is another group – squad players. These guys are vitally important, especially to the Irish provinces, because they manage the load in the PRO14 while the test players are away with Ireland alongside your NIQ or currently NIQ signings and your youth prospects. To be brutally honest, they aren’t your top players because, if they were, they’d be in or around the Ireland camp regularly enough that you’d be forced to find someone to cover them but that doesn’t mean they are disposable. They are vital, in fact. They are guys who might be near the end of their career or at a point where they’ve stopped being youth prospects and, after a few caps, find themselves well down the pecking order at test level.

Let’s call them Pat McSquadplayer.

You have to convince Pat McSquadplayer that beating Zebre away on a wet Friday evening in February during the Six Nations is as important to his career as it is for yours. Pat isn’t stupid. He knows that, at 28+ years of age, his chances at becoming established at test level, or earning more than the few caps he might have gotten against the USA one November or against Italy in the Six Nations a few seasons ago is exponentially more unlikely the longer he stays outside of the test bubble. Pat also knows, deep down, that bar one or usually two injuries he’ll be wearing a club suit and tie in the stands when the big games come around but he has to believe that he can make that step up to the top level. He must believe that, in fact.

But you, as the coach, know that Pat McSquadplayer is one good academy prospect away from the dreaded “Thanks For The Memories” video compilation of McSquadplayer making metres against the Dragons, Zebre and Cardiff Blues being posted on Twitter for 34 retweets and 140 likes.

Your job as a coach is to keep Pat McSquadplayer contracted and productive up until the time comes to cut him so that someone younger and potentially better can take his spot. When that time comes, you have to cut him. He won’t agree with you. He’ll think you lied to him – and maybe you did – but that’s the game you play as coach and squad player.

The problem is, though, that Pat McSquadplayer used to be that younger and potentially better player but he waited too long for a chance that never came. That time period between the age of 23 and 28 is a dance between what the coach wants – as much depth as possible – and what the player wants – to play in big matches, get paid big money and live the dream of being a top rugby player.

The two dreams are broadly incompatible for the most part.

Attaining that balance is a key part of building a competitive squad. Knowing who to keep and who to cut and when is the hardest part of that job. If you’re too ruthless, you could leave yourself thin on numbers at key times. If you’re too handy with contracts – or, worse, you don’t know you’re being too handy with contracts – you end up with a lot of “senior” players clogging your payroll that are below the standard required to win the biggest trophies. Leinster are superb at keeping depth guys around up until they are replaceable and then allowing the squad players that they assume aren’t going to make it at Leinster-level to either leave for elsewhere or release. Their record of knowing who to keep and who to release is astoundingly good, with the only recent slip-ups being John Cooney and Tadhg Beirne out of all the players that they’ve voluntarily lost at a young age.

That’s my biggest takeaway from Sunderland ‘Til I Die in microcosm. The best clubs – the most successful ones – are ruthlessly efficient at;

• Identifying players top players appropriate for their level of ambition and signing/retaining them in line with your budget.
• Identifying role-players to successfully augment the top players, in line with your budget.
• Identifying future players to replace the ones at the top level.

Anyone who isn’t good enough that is retained beyond their usefulness to the group is an anchor that drags down standards sooner or later. These players don’t know that they are dragging the collective down – they are often good people doing their best – but if you do not ruthlessly maintain your standards in your role players, they will find a new, lower level for you to inhabit.

In the next part of this series, I’ll look at Munster’s journey from 2012 to 2016, and see where I think we need to go from there and beyond.