Leinster 10 Ulster 20

No collisions, no win, no loop.

Leinster showed that if you can live with them in the collisions, they are as vulnerable as anyone else. That didn't just happen either - Ulster imposed those conditions on them with an excellent game plan well executed by pumped-up players with a point to prove.

Match Importance

Match Quality

Match Intensity

Standard of Opposition

3.5

A fundamental truth about this game is that when you are on the back foot most of the time, it is infinitely harder to win.

At times, it feels like Leinster are so good that these fundamental truths about the game don’t apply to them but, like gravity, collision dominance will always find a way to get the drop on you.

It’s not impossible to win without collision dominance, mind you, it’s just way more difficult and requires more complex strategic concepts. Essentially, you play ON the front foot while you try to play AROUND being on the back foot.

Play Leinster often enough, and you’ll understand what the latter is like while they, usually, enjoy playing around with the former. When you see Leinster at their best, it is off the principle of front foot ball. This has been consistent in their invincible PRO14 season and all those regular-season games where it seems like they can plug in any young player they like and get results. To an extent, Leinster are not used to playing without collision dominance so when they encounter scenarios where they aren’t winning the collisions they usually win, they can appear flat, confused, sloppy in possession and vulnerable at the breakdown. Normally that only happens at the upper end of the Champions Cup – like against Saracens, La Rochelle or perhaps Toulouse – but it happened here in the RDS against an energized, focused and well prepared Ulster side who rocked up to Ballsbridge with a game plan built to take away what Leinster do well.

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It’s generally agreed that when you are playing on the front foot, things tend to come that bit easier for your halfbacks. You have a larger pocket to play in, you have compressed defenders to manipulate and isolated edge defenders to pick off and all of your play seems to invade the opponent’s territory almost by default. Everything just seems to work that bit easier.

But what is “the front foot”, and how did Ulster prevent Leinster from playing with it in this game? At a very basic level, playing on the front foot is to play in an environment where you win collisions you scheme to contest. Playing on the back foot is when you are not winning those collisions.

Not everyone schemes to win collisions in the same part of the field or in the same game state but you have to win collisions somewhere if you want to win a game of rugby, bar some freak events that no coach wants to rely on. This is a collision sport, no matter how many times you see people talking about “spaces not faces” or whatever else you tell kids when you’re coaching minis. At the elite level, this is a game that is based on winning enough collisions that you create space because of the threat of those collisions. But not all collisions are created equally. At the elite level, opposition forwards and primary carriers are videoed to death so you know before the game who is you need to double up on and who you can drift on because you know he’s an easy one-man stop for the inside shoulder defender.

The key to winning big at the elite level is having more Two Man Stop guys than you do We Can Drift guys. Leinster’s success from 2017 onwards has been built on this ratio. Sexton is still the attacking architect of this team, Henshaw, Keenan and Ringrose are core drivers of the overall strategy and Lowe is a key difference-maker but it is the ball carrying threat of their pack on which everything else is built.

To understand what Leinster do in attack, we must first understand the principles they play under.

When Leinster are at their best, they batter you with options off screens in the aftermath of won collisions. As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of Leinster’s attacking scheme is built on loops. Previously, Johnny Sexton would loop around screen runners for a second touch but now, Leinster’s attack mostly loops around him. That isn’t to say that Sexton never loops around runners anymore – he’s done it a fair bit already this season already, actually – but a lot of their action is based on finding a looped runner (off scrumhalf or first receiver) to make the killer break by attacking uncommitted space with a late-arriving run.

Look at this for an example of a loop line working perfectly;

Ross Molony attacking the uncommitted space from a blindside starting position when Moore loads up on Furlong and Carter gets snagged by McGrath’s bait line – that’s the loop theory in action. The last-second pass creates the break and Leinster should really have scored here.

Layers, loops and options are what make Leinster tick. It is a mixture of simplicity and complexity, brute force and subtlety with hard to track late runners adding to the defensive load. It is difficult to defend but far from impossible as long as you’re aware of the threats Leinster keep hidden in their pockets as they progress across the field.

Even in this play, you can see the options that Leinster play with across a two-phase sequence.

There are 7 or 8 legit options that the defence has to contend with but, in reality, Ulster only really have to deal with three and, if you’re being economic, they only really have to deal with one – the primary ball-handler off #9.

Ulster seemed to exert a lot of effort shooting hard onto Leinster’s central forward ball handler to pressure their ability to hit that inside/outside/sceen pass.

It wasn’t without risk but most of the time, it was effective in preventing Leinster from getting their looped runners away and ensuring their layers didn’t flow seamlessly from one phase to the next.

Ulster mixed up big pressure on the middle forward in that first pod with double hits on the ball carrying forward off #10 (if that ball-carrying forward happened to be Furlong) with breakdown pressure applied in the wider channels to stress Leinster’s recycle of the ball, which is a weak point in their attack in general but it’s usually covered quite well by Van Der Flier and Ringrose.

Henshaw at outside centre sounds really good for Leinster but when he’s also a primary ball carrier, it puts pressure on Frawley – a different type of midfielder to Henshaw but, for this point, Ringrose – and the other outside backs to secure that ball. Penny and Ruddock are good players but they don’t have the pace to cover those wider rucks to the same level. Ulster saw a lot of joy in those “flow” rucks when they chose to attack there.

With the chain of possession broken off #9 – or at the very least, stymied – a lot of the playmaking heat fell back on Ross Byrne and I felt that he was a little too wedded to playing the ball in hand during his time on the field but I think a lot of that was down to how well Ulster managed to monopolise possession at key junctures of this game. They were described as playing “one out rugby” on RTE but this wasn’t a lack of imagination on their part, it was part of a strategy to minimise their risk when they had the ball to make Leinster’s possession more expensive.

Leinster have two modes of defence – one when they rate you physically and one where they don’t. When they don’t rate you physically, they will stay out of the defensive ruck completely and look to stop and slow you in the tackle. This way, you always seem to be running into blue shirts and they use intelligent defensive readers of the game like Ringrose and Henshaw to close out the edges so it feels like there’s no escape. You can’t go through, you can’t go around so you end up kicking the ball back to Leinster.

I don’t think Leinster rated Ulster physically pre-game. Why? They rarely competed at the breakdown and Ulster just continued to hammer off #9 with little or no pass action on the pod to ensure they kept possession for the next phase. I’ll show you some long sequences of Ulster attack in fast forward. I’ll slow it down when Leinster compete at the breakdown.

So just the one on dozens of phases across both halves. That last one wasn’t a “compete” either, it was Penny being penalised for rolling on the wrong side as he tried to stop and slow in the tackle. Leinster will double down on their physical advantage whenever they can – be it an actual advantage or a perceived one – and make you play through them, something easier said than done when you’re running into the likes of Porter, Kelleher, Furlong, Doris, Conan or James Ryan. I don’t mean any disrespect to the guys who were playing instead of these players, but they are not in the same tier of physicality and that has an impact when you scheme your defence like this.

Ulster didn’t need to be more expansive off #9 because their primary aim was to retain the ball and roll across the face of the Leinster defence until they found the forward edge, a bad fold and an isolation.

Failing that, there was always the possibility of a bad roll away, especially when you prioritise retaining the ball off #9 and highlighting any player who is looking to roll into the cleanout lane.

Ulster didn’t need to play expansively to win – they needed the discipline to play smart rugby when they were in possession, starve Leinster of that same possession and then attack the hinges of Leinster’s attacking system to make their phase play expensive. When you throw in Leinster’s malfunctioning lineout to the mix, you can get a good picture of how Leinster looked so flat and found it so difficult, most of the time, to gain any kind of advantage.

We can’t separate the result from Leinster being without the primary core of their pack here. Any side in the world would miss Andrew Porter, Cian Kelleher, James Ryan, Caelan Doris, Jack Conan, Josh Van Der Flier, Johnny Sexton, Hugo Keenan and James Lowe but as long as these players remain core components of Ireland’s test side, their availability for Leinster will be relatively limited depending on the context.

That said, Ulster were without some key guys too so the significance of the win cannot be handwaved away so easily. This felt like a big moment for Ulster and rightly so. Winning at the RDS in an InterPro is significant, no matter what anyone says. What does it mean for Leinster? I guess that the performance away to Dragons wasn’t a one-off and it may cause some concern for them in the long run when they have to rotate their squad and, perhaps, asks questions of their halfbacks in the post-Sexton era as some of the issues that present themselves in a collision-parity environment were present again here. That’s a question that will become more prominent as the months go on but for now, Leinster will reset and almost certainly rotate in the big hitters for the game against Connacht. Make no mistake, Ulster showed how to attack Leinster’s attacking structure here and despite living on the edge at times, they showcased what can be done with a plan focused on what Leinster actually do, not what people might think they do.

The question for Connacht is this – can you break Leinster down in the same way?

The Wally Ratings: #LEIvULS

The Wally Ratings explainer page is here.  

Players are rated based on their time on the pitch, if they were playing notably out of position, and on the overall curve of the team performance. DNP means the player did not feature and N/A means they weren’t on the pitch long enough to warrant a fair rating.