Gerry Thornley/On Rugby:No matter the outcomes of yesterday's round of crisis talks at player and management level within Leinster, this has been another embarrassing episode in a very troubled year for the province.

Ironically, on the pitch it has been Ireland's most successful year since 1985, but off it the problems have extended beyond Leinster's boundaries and simply reflect the continuing mismanagement of the professional game in this country.

No doubt the wagons will be circled and the IRFU and Leinster powerbrokers will maintain everything in the garden is rosy, but that clearly isn't the case. The heave against Gary Ella by some senior Leinster players may have backfired, merely serving to galvanise those who are disenchanted with some of the leading internationals.

Nonetheless, it does serve to highlight the botched management of Ireland's coaching resources, such management as there is. And this is leaving aside the flawed blueprint for the club game from IRFU director of rugby development Eddie Wigglesworth that has the clubs up in arms and the less-than-wholehearted support for a 22-game Celtic League from Munster and Leinster.

Amid their current troubles, Leinster players are simply flabbergasted that Declan Kidney is bound for the Gwent Dragons, and that he is remains an indictment of the IRFU's handling of one of Ireland's most successful coaches ever at provincial and underage level.

The root cause was the decision to foist Kidney onto the Irish coaching ticket as the assistant to Eddie O'Sullivan. It demonstrated a keener, if flawed, interest in public relations and a supposed "dream ticket" than in sound criteria for assessing and monitoring professional coaches.

To compound this mistake, when a select few of the IRFU powerbrokers awarded O'Sullivan a new four-year contract, and also greater freedom to choose his own back-up team, they never seemed to think through the consequences of their actions at all with regard to Kidney.

All they could come up with, as an afterthought, was a non-coaching role per se as their newly-created performance manager-age grade rugby. As a sweetener the under-21 job became vacant after Mark McCall had been rerouted to Ulster, where they had resisted the IRFU's overtures to have Kidney installed. That he might latterly have been the solution to Leinster's problems seems not to have been considered. Now he has been lost.

In the circumstances, Leinster and the IRFU wouldn't have a plan B now in the event of removing Ella, and after the players' backing probably won't be inclined to go looking for one. For the record, the four who chose Ella were Wigglesworth, Mick Dawson, John Hussey and Bryan McLoughlin. The Leinster Provincial Team Management Committee, who have been monitoring events and will presumably either reaffirm their support for Ella or remove him when they meet on Thursday, are Dawson, McLoughlin, Louis Magee, Paddy Boylan and Caleb Powell.

The weekend's expression of player power, while not ending Ella's reign one year into a three-year deal, has certainly wounded him and clearly wouldn't have happened unless there were problems.

The week that culminated in Leinster's 50-21 defeat to Llanelli on April 16th appears to have been the critical one for Ella. The preceding Monday two players reportedly turned up hung-over at training and it was felt by team-mates the matter was not dealt with strongly enough. By comparison, when some Leinster players committed the same sin three seasons ago under Matt Williams, their punishment was to be sent away from training and turn up at 6.30 a.m. for the next fortnight. They didn't transgress again.

Ella had, until yesterday's four-hour clear-the-air meeting between the Leinster players, undoubtedly lost the support of at least some of his players. Winning that back and getting Leinster back on track will be a hell of an achievement.

He hasn't been helped by Leinster's extraordinary mismanagement off the pitch, nor by international call-ups in a World Cup year and a freakish spate of injuries. As a result the Blackrock and Ireland under-21 winger John Hearty became Leinster's 54th player of the season when used at outside centre against Ulster last Friday.

"How can Gary be blamed for 12 players having operations this season?" reflected one of them yesterday, who also maintained that some of his team-mates would do better to look in the mirror. Indeed, the bulk of the players felt angry that Ella would have been made a scapegoat for all the shambolic ills in Leinster's professional operation.

The Leinster Branch CEO Mick Dawson has been moved to lament Leinster's poor public relations this season. And this is a season when, of course, there was the failure to register Felipe Contepomi for the Heineken Cup, the decision to switch their Euro home matches to Lansdowne Road and the poorly marketed opener against Biarritz, which drew a mere 7,000 spectators.

Extra money was generated from the games against Sale and Cardiff, but possibly at the cost of qualification for the knockout stages for the first time in three years, which cost at least 500,000 in lost revenue.

All the while, Leinster's age-old problems of a goalkicker and tactical-kicker outhalf remained, effectively costing them the match at home to Sale and with it qualification for the knockout stages. And then Paul Burke heads to Munster, when Leinster's need is patently the greater. Somebody took their eye off the ball there.

One can add in the state of the Donnybrook dustbowl, which prompted the CEO of Irish Rugby Union Players Association, Niall Woods, to at least partially blame it for some of Leinster's recent injury woes.

Dawson's response was to lament that there were too many schools matches in February. But there are always too many schools matches in February. The Celtic League fixture list has been out since last summer but it's as if nobody thought to look at it. How do you put a positive spin on all of that?