FROM THE BLINSIDE:. . . and coach Joe Schmidt is an astute guy who keeps his players hungry, is well balanced and calm and gets the best out of his troops, writes ALAN QUINLAN
THE HEINEKEN Cup is a pig of a tournament to try to win back-to-back.
Winning it once is tough enough but back-to-back nearly always turns out to be beyond whoever has just won it. You can be good enough, you can be hard enough, you can be professional enough and you still might not even make it back to the final. That’s the beauty of the competition.
I watched Leinster on Sunday and they were just as dominant as they are in every match I see them in these days. They destroyed Bath in nearly every area of the game and it was only carelessness that prevented them running away with it before half-time.
They’ll be mad with themselves they didn’t put the game away and I’ve a feeling Bath are in for a bit of a trimming on Saturday night.
But can Leinster go all the way again? That’s a silly question actually. Of course they can. Along with Toulouse and Clermont Auvergne, they’re worthy favourites at this point. If they can get Brian O’Driscoll back in time for the latter stages and in the meantime work out who they want partnering Leo Cullen in the secondrow, they have every chance of doing it again. The better question though is: will they?
Every campaign is different. Circumstances change. But no campaign is more difficult than the one after you’ve lifted the cup. It’s not just a matter of other teams getting themselves up for the game against you. It’s more that other teams treat you differently now and use matches against you to make their own statements.
Nobody underestimates you any more. Everybody knows who you are and what you can do. There’s no chance of you just tiptoeing into a match in France and surprising the hell out of a team who were expecting to beat you. Those days are gone, at least until you go out of the competition again.
But while you still hold the title, you find yourself coming up against teams who are looking to use you as the kickstart to their season. They might not be playing very well, or their coach might be under pressure, and in the normal course of any other season, they might not be a bad draw for you to have. But they spend the week building up to the match telling themselves they can change everything with a win over the champions and so they play above themselves.
The season after Munster won our second Heineken Cup, we played Montauban in the first match. The other teams in our pool were Clermont and Sale and when Montauban played away against both those sides that season they got hammered. Clermont beat them by 33 points, Sale beat them by 30. But us? The reigning champions? Ronan O’Gara had to kick a penalty with four minutes left on the clock so we could scrape a two-point win.
No wonder Leicester are the only team to win the thing back to back.
We were in big trouble that night and I was nearly the fall guy. About halfway through the second half, I found myself standing at outhalf for some reason. Obviously I was thinking it was time to show Rog a thing or two about playing 10 because instead of taking it up and going into contact I tried a spectacular skip pass looking for Justin Melk, the big South African number eight who was with us for a few months that season.
Of course, it got nowhere near him – it hit one of the Montauban players on the head and squirted out for them to kick through and score. They were going mad and you could see they were hellbent on winning from there and taking down the champions. Thank God for Rog in the end.
Leinster are in a really good place right now. They’re the benchmark for the rest of Irish rugby, no question. Joe Schmidt is an astute guy who makes a lot of changes and keeps his players hungry but above everything he’s a well-balanced and calm guy who gets the best out of them.
They missed four or five chances for tries last Sunday and they won’t get away with that in the latter stages of the competition. But the thing to remember about them is that they were so dominant that it didn’t matter.
They’re so physical and so strong they can blow teams to pieces now and survive not putting them away.
Leinster’s breakdown work is awesome. You need two elements to control that part of the game – you need ferocity and you need the right body position.
Leinster have both in spades. Every time Bath took the ball into contact, they had to send so many bodies in to protect it that eventually they were bound to be short of numbers when they moved it wide. If four and five players are having to go and compete at each ruck situation, you’re left short somewhere else in the line. It leaves gaps and weakens the defence if and when Leinster turn the ball over.
I know Bath troubled Leinster once or twice and the game ended up being closer than it needed to be but I still didn’t think Leinster were going to lose. That’s saying something about a team playing away in the Heineken Cup. The missed chances were pretty unforgivable at times but that can be worked on. If ever there’s a game to do that in, it’s the first one in a back-to-back series when you have that team at home six days later. I’d say we can be fairly certain Seán O’Brien will pass the next time he has three men outside him.
Munster had a different type of away win against the Scarlets, one where they were nowhere near as dominant as Leinster but you still had to be impressed by them. To beat a team like the Scarlets who were high on their win against Northampton, especially after going behind early on, was some achievement. Not to mention a huge blow for Scarlets.
I’d be in touch with Simon Easterby a fair bit and when you consider some of the struggles Scarlets have had over the past few seasons – budgetary struggles especially – it’s a major tribute to them that they can be so competitive in the Heineken Cup at this stage in their development. They’re young and brash and full of confidence and when it throws up results like the one against Northampton, it’s great to see.
But I think they underestimated Munster’s ability to hang on in there in a game that should have been put out of their reach early on. Rhys Priestland missed a couple of kicks and Munster were able to stay within striking distance. Paul O’Connell and O’Gara kept the belief going that Munster could get back into it. There are a lot of young guys on the Munster team but they’ve seen this done before and they knew the drill.
By the time the game was up for grabs in the last 20 minutes, Munster were able to bring Donncha O’Callaghan, Tomás O’Leary, John Hayes, Marcus Horan and Denis Leamy off the bench. Because Scarlets hadn’t taken their chances in the opening part of the game, Munster now had it in their hands to close out the win. In that situation, there’s no better team.
There was always going to be more hope than expectation surrounding this season for Munster. That has worked in their advantage in their three games so far because they’ve managed to fly in under the radar each time. When the going got tough in all three games, it was experience that got them through. They concentrated on stopping teams at source and frustrating the hell out of them, securing their own setpieces and disrupting the opposition’s. Add everything up and it makes them so tough to play against.
Winning these three games has been great for Munster but they will need more than just being hard to beat as the season goes by. They’ve won by a total of eight points over the three games and apart from not being very good for the heart, it’s going to be tough to keep going. They’re just not creating enough try-scoring chances to progress through the latter stages of the competition and if anything is going to catch up with them, that will.
As it stands, they’ve actually got the lowest try total of all the teams in their pool. That’s okay as long as you’re coming out on top when the final whistle goes but it can’t go on forever.
Scarlets will be gunning for them on Sunday. If they sit down and watch last week’s game, they’ll know they left it behind them. They’ll arrive in Limerick with nothing to lose and you’d expect them to throw caution to the wind. That’s what you do when you’re young. You get mad and you go bald-headed to redeem yourself. Munster could be in for a tougher game than some people are expecting.
It’s hard to see how Bath can put it up to Leinster however. In front of a big crowd at the Aviva, Leinster will just grow in confidence and will be dying to get the mistakes of last week out of their system. They gave themselves a key area to work on over the week and I expect them to be far more clinical and for more precise on Saturday.
Plus, I just don’t think Bath are good enough to trouble Leinster in Dublin. The pace and intensity Leinster are going to bring will be very hard for Bath to defend against and I could see Leinster running away with this one.
Defending the cup is so, so difficult but it helps to win a game playing badly. Especially one of these back-to-back games where there’s only six days between them. Leinster must be spending the week aiming to shake off the cobwebs. Bath could be in for a long night.
