RUGBY:THIS IS a story that will never grow old.

At half-time Mike Ross was an outcast. Send him back down to Cork. He was not the answer to Irish scrum problems. Bring back John Hayes. Tony Buckley even.

But sporting obituaries are never written after 40 minutes of a Heineken Cup final. By the end he was the man we all sought out.

History will record the worrying number of times Ross’s head was forced out of the scrum as the mighty Northampton frontrow of Soane Tonga’uiha, Dylan Hartley and Brian Mujati looked destined to steamroll the Leinster eight into the dirt.

And they did; all 22 of their points came off complete dominance at scrum-time.

For 40 minutes.

Horrific in its intensity, they silenced the Leinster faithful, especially the seven-man shunt, when Mujati was sin-binned, that led to Ben Foden’s try.

“We were staring down the barrel of a gun in the first half,” Ross conceded. “But we readjusted, changed our tactics slightly and it worked for us.”

At 22-6, Leinster’s dreams of a second European title in three seasons lay in tatters on the ripped up Millennium Stadium turf.

“We were winning the hit but easing off,” Ross explained. “Northampton were waiting, waiting and as soon as they sensed a weakness they have very, very good timing.

“It can be incredibly difficult to deal with if it’s done well.

“In the second half we just started doing to them what they do to us. And it worked.”

As the teams trundled off at half-time so began the “biggest two minutes” of Greg Feek’s coaching career (his words). Down went the Kiwi scrum-guru to the changing rooms, armed only with an I-Pad and clips of the previous ten engagements.

Along with Joe Schmidt, he bravely refused to replace the props, despite the tried and tested presence of Stan Wright and Heinke van der Merwe in reserve, but the nightmare scenario had become reality and it needed immediate fixing.

“I joked with Joe that I was on suicide watch at half-time,” said Feek.

“Yeah, I was a bit worried. But after having a look at it I realised, ‘Hang on, we are actually causing part of this ourselves’. I told the boys, ‘Right, let’s put our ship right. Get out and do what we have done all year’. Try not to do too much, you know?”

Feek fixed the technical glitches. It helps that the incumbent Ireland loose and tight head are good students.

“The boys, their attitude, what they give, is immense but they were doing that bit too much. If you can give too much. You can actually, you know, because you try a bit too hard rather than working together as an eight.

“The big thing for me was to say, ‘hang on, we’ve been up against Toulouse and Leicester and held our own’. We may not have got over them but we held our own and that’s all we needed to do against Northampton. Hold our own and give it to them if we needed to.”

Feek, who also doubles up as national scrum coach, came off the ledge after speaking with Ross and Cian Healy at half-time.

“I give a lot of credit to Greg Feek,” Ross continued. “He had the video at half-time. It was just a little tweak, it wasn’t much, but that was the difference between going forward and going backwards.”

What was this tweak, Mike? “Just got a little bit closer to the hooker.”

An exhausted Dylan Hartley, Northampton’s enforcer and captain, never did pack down for scrum 15 on 68 minutes. Possibly injured in the scoring of a try, it was a hammer blow for the Saints nonetheless.

But the tide had turned earlier than that as Ross explained. “Yeah, down in the right-hand corner (scrum 12 on 51 minutes). We got the angle we wanted. I think we scored from it, did we? I can’t remember. It goes pretty quick.”

Eight phases after that scrum, Jonny Sexton blazed over for his second try. The conversion made it 20-22. Two minutes later came confirmation of the pendulum’s full swing as Ross squeezed a penalty out of Tonga’uiha that Sexton landed to put Leinster in front for the first time.

The rest will be told and retold forever and a day.