The post-mortem in the aftermath of Leinster’s loss to La Rochelle in this year’s Heineken Cup final has veered from blaming the URC for not preparing them adequately, to wanton copium abuse live on the radio, to old cliches about Leinster supposedly falling down against “bigger” teams.
It’s all a bit hysterical, really. Leinster haven’t become a team of egg cartons in two weeks. This time last week, after all, they were a juggernaut powered by some of the best depth in world rugby. This week, the veil has been lifted and now all the problems are visible, supposedly.
Can 80 minutes of rugby change all that?
It can change the perception, yes, but not the reality. This is just the way sport is these days and the gift and the curse of being a top side as Leinster have been.
The reality is that Leinster are still an elite side, probably the best-resourced team in Europe and by the standards they and others hold themselves to, have probably underperformed on the European stage over the last four years since they last won a Heineken Cup in 2018. If Leinster are as good as everyone says then they must also own that level of underperformance, especially in the post-Saracens era of the last three years.
The most consistent reason for Leinster’s underperformance in Europe over the last few years has been that they are not adequately prepared for teams of La Rochelle’s size and power week to week in the URC. Forget for a moment that Leinster beat a Toulouse side that’s bigger than La Rochelle man for man in the semi-finals. A lot of pundits have. Why? I’m not sure but personally, I think that any detailed look at that game might, possibly, be forced to acknowledge Toulouse’s nightmare 8-week murderer’s row run in the TOP14 and Europe from the 20th of March to that semi-final and how it might have impacted their performance against a Leinster side that were coming off the back of a two-week break to target a block of two knock out games.
The URC schedule allowed the bulk of the Category A Leinster side to prepare for that series of knockout games.
The excuse about the URC not preparing Leinster for teams like La Rochelle like this might well be a valid one, but most of the team who started for Leinster in this final aren’t the side to prove that because they barely play in the URC at all. The average Leinster player who is heavily involved at Ireland level mostly plays for Ireland and in the Champions Cup for Leinster.
The rest of their minutes are heavily rotated cameo appearances in the URC for certain “targeted” games. The average regular-season minutes of 13 of the starting 15 in the final on Saturday was 288, with a few outliers playing above that average.
Porter – 243 minutes
Kelleher – 169 minutes
Furlong – 211 minutes
Ryan – 217 minutes
Doris – 296 minutes
Van Der Flier – 430 minutes
Conan – 230 minutes
Gibson-Park – 226 minutes
Sexton – 166 minutes
Lowe – 416 minutes
Henshaw – 193 minutes
Ringrose – 469 minutes
Keenan – 480 minutes
Van Der Flier is the only one of Leinster’s primary forwards to play north of 400 minutes. Peter O’Mahony, a good player to compare with Van Der Flier from a test level status perspective, has played 480 URC minutes. This is a direct side effect of Ireland’s player management system that attempts to keep physical burnout – and associated injuries – away from the national side. La Rochelle lose Danty, Aldritt, Dulin and Atonio to France in the same way that Leinster lose Henshaw, Keenan, Doris and Furlong to Ireland but the context is wildly different. If France lose those Danty, Aldritt and Atonio to medium/long term injury, that’s certainly troublesome but not a complete disaster by any means. It’s really more of a La Rochelle problem. If Furlong, Doris and Henshaw go down to a medium/long term injury that’s a disaster for Ireland AND Leinster because the Irish player pool is so shallow.
France have 12 clubs represented in their most recent Six Nations squad. Ireland will only ever have four provinces representing the national side so losing key guys from an Irish perspective is far more costly to everyone because the impact is amplified by squad scarcity. As a result, Irish involved players tend to play way, way less in the URC where a loss here or there isn’t a killer for your ambitions to win the tournament in the same way as more claustrophobic competitions like the Champions Cup or Six Nations.
When Leinster players make up anywhere from 12 to 14 of a matchday squad during the recent Six Nations that puts a unique burden on them that isn’t duplicated in any other test nation. Even the All Blacks – in a provincial environment often dominated by the Crusaders in a similar top-down centrally organised structure as Ireland – do not put all their eggs in one provincial basket, so to speak.
It’s for this reason that Leinster’s problems are now Ireland’s problems. No other side in the world gives up as much video and telemetry to the opposition as Ireland does in 2022. This isn’t a call to put more of My Guys into the matchday squad – every Leinster player is there on merit – but at what point does the equation change? At what point does Ireland and Leinster’s top-down cohesion and interdependence become a net negative? Not anytime soon, I reckon but it has to be a concern for Andy Farrell that the All Blacks – this summer – and the Springboks in November have been given a template to beat Ireland in every rough patch Leinster have. When Ronan O’Gara said that he picked up elements of how he could beat Leinster because of things he saw against Connacht and Leicester, I can imagine Andy Farrell feeling a brief frisson of concern.
If Ronan O’Gara spotted that a few weeks ago, what did Ian Foster, Rassie Erasmus, Dave Rennie and Eddie Jones see on Saturday? The cohesion Ireland and Leinster have used to turn things around at test level after a rocky year one under Farrell and Catt is one of our greatest assets. As Ireland and Leinster have become more and more intertwined, Ireland’s performance levels have gone up.
As Eddie Jones noted before this year’s Six Nations game against England;
“They are literally, and I say this without any hesitation, the most cohesive side in the world. The bulk of their team train together for the bulk of the year.
“So they are very well-coordinated in their attack, they are very structured, they’re very sequenced in set plays. And they’re tough around the breakdown. That poses a great challenge for us. But we’re looking forward to the challenge, we’re not intimidated by any team and we’re looking forward to playing against them.”
None of this is off-the-radar. Everyone knows it. But with great cohesion comes the downside of knowledge. How will Eddie Jones England play this summer? If you want to get an idea, you need to go back to March. If you want an idea of how Ireland might play at our best and worst, all you need do is look at Leinster against Toulouse from three weeks ago and La Rochelle at the weekend.
Only time will tell if it comes back to haunt us on the grandest stage of the sport.
