Leamy articulates his relief

Fresh from receiving his man-of-the-match accolade, Denis Leamy tried to articulate how what had begun as an afternoon laden with the promise of easy pickings ended up as a fraught, last-gasp cavalry charge that yielded the all-important fourth try and a bonus point.

There was a note of admiration in his voice for a Cardiff team that had "fronted up" in Saturday's European Cup tie at Thomond Park, making a real nuisance of themselves until finally undone in the eighth minute of injury time.

Leamy admitted: "Coming over here (to Thomond Park) some teams wilt but they (Cardiff) just kept at it, plugging away, forcing us into mistakes. They scored two good tries. It was never going to be easy. We expected a hard-fought game and that is exactly what we got.

"We threw everything at them. In the end we had to put 13 or 14 men into a maul to finally blast them over. They did the homework very well. In the maul they belted it with bodies flying in from every angle. They did it very well. It's something we have to go back and look at it and see what lessons we can learn from this."

He argued that there had been no sense of complacency before the match on foot of last week's victory in the Principality.

"It (this match) was fraught with danger in terms of talk of records and people building us up but we just had to concentrate on the game in hand.

"Once the game was won, we had to go looking for the bonus point but there was certainly no talk of it beforehand. If we were offered nine points before the start of these back-to-back games, then we would have taken it every time."

A smile creased his features when he was asked what went through his mind when Cardiff looked like scoring an equalising try on 61 minutes. "I certainly . . . thought thank God he (Cardiff centre Jamie Robinson) dropped it. That gave us a serious boot in the arse. We had to refocus and get down the pitch.

"We had a rocky patch but steadied the ship and then threw the kitchen sink at them. In the end we got over. They defended like madmen but we just about managed to get over."

Of his own brace of tries, Leamy offered this low-key assessment: "It was nice to get over. It's nice to come out with the win and to get the bonus point is extra special."