D'Arcy has his captain waxing lyrical

Brian O'Driscoll, assailed by a battery of microphones and tape-recorders, didn't try and mitigate his satisfaction with traditional post match platitudes at what approximated to the perfect result at Lansdowne Road on Saturday evening. As he would subsequently point out, "not many teams will score four tries against Gloucester", so the bonus point was especially cherished.

Victory, though, won't have camouflaged Leinster's shortcomings in several areas but addressing those was for another day. Instead the Ireland and Leinster captain alighted on a brilliant performance from his midfield partner-in-crime Gordon D'Arcy.

"I thought Darce had a great game. He was probably hard done by on the man of the match but that's probably a back being biased for one of his fellow backs. I thought he was excellent right from the off, scoring the try.

"I just had a word with him before the game saying they're (Gloucester) not going to put us down today. He certainly took that on board and ran some great lines; so powerful and his defence was great. We made a couple of blunders but we'll improve on those."

O'Driscoll also paid tribute to what was a tour de force by outhalf Felipe Contepomi in terms of the Argentinian's accuracy with the placed ball. "Phil can be awesome at times and is a pleasure to play outside. His goal-kicking was exceptional. People don't understand how difficult it is out there. You have to be a quality goal-kicker at Lansdowne Road no matter what the conditions are like. It can be a beautifully calm day but it's not like that down on the pitch. It just shows the bit of practice he had during the week worked a treat," he laughed.

O'Driscoll was gracious enough to acknowledge a fine display by one of Gloucester's 20-year-old centres in a very young inside three in the backline. "I think in particular Anthony Allen looks like a great player. He was the stand-out of the three of them (Ryan Lamb and Jack Adams the others) but it's one game. He looked like a nice player; good balanced runner, able to offload and runs some good lines."

Leinster coach Michael Cheika enjoyed the result if not all aspects of the performance. His immediate post match thoughts centred on next Sunday's crucial game in Edinburgh. "They (Edinburgh) have our measure in the Magners. This is a real key game. We have spoken about it immediately post match. We are going to be under immense pressure up there. They play a very lateral game, side to side. They have a big man in the middle in Rob Dewey, who trucks it up and gets good go forward.

"He was the biggest contributor to our defeat earlier in the year. We have to work out a strategy to get around that and then get around them. We want to go up there and get the advantage in the group. If we can do that it would be a big plus for us."

For Gloucester coach Dean Ryan there was an acknowledgement that the match had been something of a learning experience for his young team. "I don't think we showed a lot of maturity but there are times when that's not surprising given that it's our first entry with this group of players. I think ultimately that lack of maturity in the first half killed us. We just gave them too much cheap high field position and they're too good to do that. I know what this group is capable of and we always said that at some stage we'd have to close ranks and support one another when we make mistakes and don't show enough maturity. Today may be one of those occasions."