Leinster showed their quality last weekend with a dominant win over La Rochelle at the Aviva Stadium.
There were a couple of key moments where the game got away from the French side, and had they managed to force a stop the game could have looked a bit different. However, that's easier said than done and there only looked to be one winner from the very start.
Leinster dominated possession and La Rochelle struggled to exit from their own half, even in the opening ten minutes. A fast start to the second half through Ryan Baird’s try was the winning of the game.
There were huge positives for Leinster: winning the game without James Ryan’s leadership in the pack and at the lineout, Jamie Osborne’s left foot took the heat off James Lowe from an exit perspective and Ross Byrne dealt with the physical targeting in midfield, shrugging it off in one of his best performances to date.
Jamison Gibson-Park was in menacing form too, adding to his display the week before against Leicester.
Leinster put down a serious marker with their physicality against a more powerful French pack. If they go on to win the tournament, they’ll have to dispatch Northampton, who will challenge them technically, and then possibly go back to that template of beating a powerful French pack if Toulouse manage to overcome Harlequins.
Leinster have removed some of the question marks over their performance obstacles, but it isn’t plain sailing towards their fifth star just yet. They’re more than capable of achieving it, however there’s enough still standing in their way.
Not to discredit Leinster, they were impressively nasty in the contact area to dominate La Rochelle, but the opposition looked tired. The travelling from South Africa to Cork via Paris to allow for further training time has been well documented. It obviously takes a toll on the travelling team, but La Rochelle were still confident that if they showed up, they could beat anyone.
I spent some time at the La Rochelle training sessions last Tuesday and Thursday and I fully understood why they felt they could go to Dublin and win. They didn’t necessarily expect a win, but they knew they could topple Leinster again.
When you have a forward pack that contains the size of Uini Atonio and Will Skelton, you’ll always have a chance. You might not expect guys in the 150kg category to care too much about the finer details of the game, but when you watch Skelton on the training pitch, there’s more to these fellas than sheer mass.
The positive and welcoming environment that they created as well as their interest in smaller details of their strategy shows that their size isn’t their only strength.
Ronan O'Gara’s side had to be clever with how they trained all week. Shorter sessions with lower intensity had to take precedence because of the amount of travel that they had after a close encounter in South Africa.
Some of their key players only took to the pitch for very minimal periods in the Thursday session. One even flew home to deal with a personal issue before returning to Dublin to take his place in the starting line-up. It was hardly the best preparation for such a crunch tie with their biggest European rivals.
However, all the story was coming out of Cork and the La Rochelle camp. I’m sure Leinster had their own disruptions in preparation, but that preparation was done in a way that it always is, on campus in UCD.
I’ve no doubt that they were carrying their own bangs and bruises from the Leicester game. Take Ross Byrne for example, his arm was strapped up after taking a bang towards the end of the Leicester game the week previous. I’m sure they could put their own spin on similar circumstances. Rugby is a physical game and the reality is that teams can’t train fully or as a full unit in the week between knockout Champions Cup game. They would instead work smarter.
That was a learning for us as coaches as we watched on with the back-to-back Champions Cup winners on our home pitch in Cork Constitution; the different ways of managing intensity throughout the training week, with physical parts of the game like the breakdown being managed in shorter blocks but an increased mental intensity.
If you want to train with shorter blocks, your mental energy needs to drive your accuracy or you won’t get through too many of your game strategies.
Even with shorter sessions and a change in environment to freshen the group, La Rochelle looked too sluggish to deal with the intensity that Leinster brought. Any team would struggle with Leinster in that form, whether they had been travelling or were fully fresh.
Leinster weren’t the all-singing, all-dancing, attack-focused team that people expect them to be. That’s underpinned by high standards around small technical areas of the game, a dominant set-piece platform and destruction at the breakdown.
They added an edge from a physicality perspective, presumably through the coaching of Jacques Nienaber, which pushed Leinster to a new height at the weekend.
Even Leo Cullen built the story of bitterness throughout the week in the media, raising the issue of Irish people getting drawn into the enchantment of O’Gara, Cork people in particular. It was as though Leinster needed a chip on their shoulder. They needed to feel personally attacked to hit the emotional heights required to punch above their physical weight against la Rochelle.
We’ve seen that type of coach’s storytelling from Nienaber under the guidance of Rassie Erasmus at South Africa. Leo Cullen is capable of doing that himself, but there was a different approach last week and you can’t help but feel that Nienaber’s personal approach was harnessed in the build up to one of their finest performances in the past few seasons. It must have been Leinster’s most confrontational performance.
After the game, Leinster were clear favourites to win the tournament for all of 24 hours, until Toulouse showed that it’s far from a foregone conclusion.
Leinster have paved the way towards the success that has escaped them in the last few seasons. It won’t be easy but they’ll be expected to overcome Northampton to set up a clash of two European titans in the final.
They now have a huge opportunity to dominate the Champions Cup once again.
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