When you’re Leinster, with a target on your back wider than Andrew Porter’s head, it can be exhausting to deal with the hype, the counter-hype, the expectation and the fact that almost every single team you come up against will have watched you to death. I think it’s fair to say that Leinster Rugby has more analytical eyes on them than any other side in the last two years. Some of that is a side effect of the “hype” around Leinster, for sure, because everyone wants a little bit of that magic for themselves but if you’re a team that’s due to play Leinster’s Cat A team, there’s a real challenge in putting your analytical chops to the test.
Every coach and every analyst has their own personal theories as to how to beat Cat A Leinster. Few enough sides ever manage to do it.
You’ve heard all the tropes before. Target the breakdown. Beat them up. Kick contestably to the wings. Play on-ball. Play off-ball. Go after the lineout. Go after the scrum.
It’s all of these things and none of them.
At various times, different teams have done a few of these things during a big game but still lost in the end. It’s been suggested that you need to do ALL of them, just to have a chance so the big question last week was what La Rochelle could do out of all the things people think you should be doing to possibly stop Leinster, just to have a chance.
Remember, Leinster were 12 point favourites coming into this game and most pundits were predicting a Leinster win, almost as a matter of course.
Did La Rochelle slow Leinster’s breakdown and “destroy” them at the breakdown? No. They really didn’t. 65% of Leinster’s ruck ball was under three seconds and their average ruck speed was 3.13 seconds per breakdown. Against Toulouse, 66% of their ruck ball was under three seconds and their average ruck speed was 2.86 seconds per breakdown. Against Leicester, 56% of Leinster’s ruck ball was under three seconds and their average ruck speed was 3.39 seconds per breakdown. Leinster turned over the ball 12 times against both Toulouse and Leicester. They only turned the ball over against La Rochelle six times.
By any metric, Leinster played a cleaner game than both of the previous rounds but still scored zero tries and, in truth, looked like losing the game for the last 15 minutes at least even while up on the scoreboard.
So how did it happen? I think La Rochelle inverted the core machinery of Leinster’s kicking game and, in doing so, gave the rest of Europe a template to beat Leinster. If you have even a broadly similar size profile and a good lineout, you can attempt to do what La Rochelle did throughout this game to really good effect.
The first thing to do is understand what Leinster generally do when you move them into certain positions on the field. This is the dangerous part. La Rochelle were able to keep in touch with Leinster’s usual fast start by hijacking Leinster’s restart. Now you might say that kicking off to Leinster isn’t ideal because it means they’ve scored – and I’d agree with you – but I think this action was a good way of duplicating what would have been part of La Rochelle’s kicking strategy in the early game.
Leinster kicked off the game and La Rochelle came under pressure immediately after they exited up the field because of a maul infringement – something they would do consistently throughout the early and mid-game due to inaccurate entries by Danny Priso.
This was part of La Rochelle’s big picture strategy that didn’t really play out all that well on the day but that hinted at their overall aims to not engage with Leinster’s kicking game on any terms but their own. La Rochelle weren’t focused on attacking Leinster in the air – something Munster have done repeatedly to little success – so instead they were focused on disrupting, in the first case, Leinster’s maul feint/hooker launch by attacking the front lifters, closing off the blindside as a decoy run option and creating a “wall” for Kelleher/Sheehan to run into on the openside off Van Der Flier’s pass option.
When we see how this lineout plays out, you get a good example of why La Rochelle only chose to send a three-man pod into a counter-launch action on just one of Leinster’s lineouts.
By flooding numbers to central spaces to cover Leinster’s ultra dangerous 2/3 phase strike moves off the lineout, La Rochelle were (mostly) able to depower Leinster’s ability to hurt them with critical linebreaks. Those linebreaks often result in the kind of field position that ends with Leinster scoring tries, especially as part of Leinster’s usual fast start and big 10-minute push on either side of halftime. This is when they, usually, blow sides away so when La Rochelle avoided conceding 7 point killer scores, they were always in range to strike back.
But I don’t think La Rochelle purely won because of this. It was only a part.
“How’d you solve the icing problem?”
In the 2008 film Iron Man the ending sequence of the movie featured Iron Man squaring off with the much larger Iron Monger. Earlier in the movie, Tony Stark had run into trouble while flying around in his Iron Man suit when he flew too high and found his suit began to ice up in the upper atmosphere and lose power, sending him tumbling back to earth. Tony Stark would fix this problem soon after.
During the penultimate fight, Iron Man took off into the sky, baiting Iron Monger to follow him. As Iron Man reached the top of his altitude, he was caught by Iron Monger. As Iron Monger began to wrap his mechanical arms around Iron Man, Iron Monger gloated about how advanced his suit was. Tony Stark asked him how he’d solved the icing problem. Iron Monger didn’t know about the icing problem at altitude so, covered in ice, tumbled back down to the ground, tilting the fight into Stark’s favour.
Leinster’s kicking game is a bit like Iron Man baiting Iron Monger to a place where he can’t survive. On the ground, Iron Man couldn’t live with Iron Monger’s size and power so he changed where the fight was happening. Leinster do this by controlling the sequence of play against bigger opposition that they think has too much for them physically and changes where the fight happens. Leinster are aware that they can’t take on a side like La Rochelle or Toulouse size for size, so they change the battle to one that attacks your fitness. In practicality, this means kicking the ball really long, kicking often and then maximising your Pass Per Carry ratio when you do have possession.
All of this maximises the ball in playtime, which Leinster use to “ice” bigger opponents. The higher the ball in play time, the more likely it is that larger teams can struggle, especially if they make the mistake of trading kicks and transitions against Leinster. Ugo Mola directly referenced this after the semi-final defeat when Leinster kicked the ball nearly a full kilometre and used that to generate a Ball In Play time of 37 minutes 49 seconds which, following a game the week before with 43 minutes of ball in play time, was too much for Toulouse to handle.
Leinster tried to do this against La Rochelle but found an opponent that was almost completely unwilling to play the game according to Leinster’s preferred sequence. In the early part of the contest, Leinster’s scores came primarily from penalties earned via the breakdown or offside or both. La Rochelle were willing to live with these penalties as long as Leinster kept kicking them because it allowed them to invert Leinster’s preferred sequence at the kickoff, despite conceding three points. Bar the first restart – which ended with a sloppy penalty at the breakdown – La Rochelle consistently kicked long to Leinster and then hijacked Leinster’s tendency to exit long from that spot almost every time through the boot of Sexton, Gibson-Park and Lowe.
Off the resulting lineouts – which Leinster often contested in the air vigorously – La Rochelle did a really good job of securing possession first & foremost but then did a better job of hanging onto the ball and then rolling across the face of the defence. They scored their first try off the back of that very sequence.
At numerous points in those sequences, La Rochelle passed up obvious “smart kick” opportunities to keep the phase pressure up on Leinster. When Leinster kicked long to La Rochelle, the likes of Dulin and West either exited directly to touch – where La Rochelle focused on stuffing Leinster’s strike plays rather than attacking them in the air – or they ran back Leinster’s reset kicks with a heavy, low-risk game that maximised heavy contact. La Rochelle’s Pass Per Carry ratio was 1.04 on 61% possession. What La Rochelle did, effectively, was reduce the ball in play time by controlling the sequence of the game and making sure that a low PPC game prioritised forward on forward carrying.
La Rochelle made Leinster’s possession incredibly expensive by reducing the ball in play time and then reducing Leinster’s share of that possession. Leinster had a PPC ratio of 1.7, which put a big focus on pass accuracy and, even with good ruck ball, that exposed elements of inefficiency in Leinster’s attack. The same thing was visible in Leinster’s win over Leicester. Leicester had 56% possession and kept the Ball In Play time down to just 27 minutes. Leinster flew out of the blocks in that game but lost the second half 14-3.
La Rochelle limited the Ball In Play time to 32 minutes in this game – a full five minutes less than the Toulouse game – and forced Leinster to play La Rochelle’s game at La Rochelle’s pace. The last time a bulk of this Leinster side took on a French opponent and lost was… France in the Six Nations. What was the ball in play count in that game? 32 minutes.
If you have the size to trouble Leinster the key isn’t kicking the ball or kicking smartly – although La Rochelle did that too in the second half when they were right in range of Leinster – the key is to make the game shorter, punish Leinster physically with the ball in hand, nail your lineout to ensure you keep possession and, ultimately, make their possession expensive. Leinster don’t really attack at the defensive breakdown. They can win jackal turnovers, don’t get me wrong, but they mostly fill the field, make their tackles and bait you into “kicking smartly” where they can start controlling the game.
If you keep the ball in play time below 33 minutes, dominate possession when Leinster try to start their sequence of play by kicking long to you after a quick start and keep Leinster away from your lineout, you’ll go a long way to beating them if you even have close to parity in the pack. It’s not easy – they are one of the best teams in the world – but La Rochelle showed that they are far from unbeatable.
