ON RUGBY:Players are professional enough to quickly put any grievances from Saturday behind them, writes GERRY THORNLEY

IRELAND’S GROUP rivals Italy, a la the Scots, have been counting down to the World Cup for weeks or even months now. Meantime, Munster and especially Leinster are wringing every last drop out of the domestic and European seasons by ensuring they meet again in Thomond Park on May 28th. Even the Top 14 final, which normally takes place as Wimbledon rolls into view in the height of the French summer, will only be a week later.

The man who guided Spain to both the World Cup and European Championships in soccer, Vicente del Bosque, was the least enthusiastic man in Spain about the recent glut of classicos. Similarly, Declan Kidney and the Ireland coaches (not to mention medical and fitness and conditioning staff) will have decidedly mixed views about the majority of their World Cup frontliners testing their friendships by beating each other up and developing more grievances for the third time this season.

Yet, on the plus side, it will afford Kidney and co more opportunity to study the relevant claims of a host of fringe contenders such as, for example, Conor Murray, or the contrasting merits of Donnacha Ryan and Kevin McLaughlin for that probable blindside flanker-cum-lock slot.

Besides, for all the concern about wrapping players in cotton wool in World Cup years, it’s worth recalling the 2007 World Cup. The finalists were South Africa and England, with the Springboks mostly comprising players from the Bulls and the Sharks, who had made it all the way to an epic Super 14 final, which the Bulls won by a point earlier that year.

Similarly, England drew most heavily from Leicester and Wasps, who had contested an all-English Heineken Cup final the previous May, a week after Leicester had won the Premiership final.

There’s an increased risk of fatigue and injury for sure, with Leinster giving the impression of hobbling to the finishing line after Ulster put them through the physical wringer on Friday the 13th and Northampton likewise after East Midlands provided their version of a bruising Demolition Derby in Saturday’s first English Premiership final.

But the players are professional enough to quickly put any grievances from Saturday behind them and, as the ’07 South African and English examples highlight, it also means players are used to success and are battle-hardened from big knockout games.

That Wasps defeat of Leicester in the ’07 Heineken Cup final remains the only final of the last 10 which the favourites didn’t ultimately win. Three weeks before, and a week after each had won their Heineken Cup semi-final, Leicester routed Wasps 40-26 at Welford Road, before going on to win their Premiership semi-finals and final. Come the Heineken Cup final at Twickenham again a week later, Wasps were lurking in the long grass.

That salutary tale perhaps has more relevance with regard to Leinster trying to complete the second half of a putative double on Saturday week, but it’s also worth noting that of the other nine favourites who won the Heineken Cup final in the last decade, as with Northampton’s 9-8 win over Munster in 2000, every single final has been a one-score game. That’s the nature of finals, especially Heineken Cup finals, and while Leinster’s tough pool may have stood to them in the quarters and semis, it will be less so in a final.

When Munster won the Heineken Cup for the second time in 2008 it was reckoned no team had ever negotiated a tougher route to the mountain top. In the pool stages, they had overcome Clermont (Challenge Cup winners and French Top 14 finalists the season before and Top 14 table toppers and beaten finalists that season), Wasps (the reigning European champions who would be English champions that season) and the Scarlets.

In the quarter-finals, they won away to Gloucester (beaten finalists in the Premiership the previous season and semi-finalists that season, after topping the table in both campaigns), Saracens (Premiership semi-finalists the season before) and then finally Toulouse, who had won all of their three previous Heineken Cup finals and would go on to win the Bouclier du Brennus when, incidentally, copying the pick-and-jam endgame tactics they had derided Munster for.

However, if Leinster emulate that achievement by going on to win their second Heineken Cup in three years this Saturday, arguably it will have been even tougher. Not alone have they beaten the reigning European, French and English champions en route to the final, but take a cursory look at the French and English semi-final line-ups and in both instances they have seen off the leading three finishers in the Top 14 (all now in the French semi-finals) as well as the top two finishers in the Premiership and now the Twickenham finalists.

It would be a crying shame if Brian O’Driscoll, especially, were to miss out on the final, or along with Gordon D’Arcy, Shane Horgan and others from the Golden Generation, miss out on a second Heineken Cup winner’s medal for that matter.

With the benefit of hindsight, and with his left knee bandaged from before the kick-off, playing O’Driscoll last Friday looks riskier now. But one also imagines that, a la Lionel Messi at Barca, when he wants to play, well, he generally does.

Ulster’s season is over, but though it won’t have felt like it in the immediate aftermath of Friday’s defeat at the RDS (unfortunately, only two sides can lift what little silverware there is on offer) and seasons generally end in defeats, this was a campaign of real, substantive progress. Furthermore, there’s a bit of a myth out there that they have been bankrolled heavily by various benefactors, be it the IRFU or Rory McIlroy. Both are utterly untrue.

Furthermore, reputed salaries of €450,000 per annum for the incoming John Afoa and Jared Payne are the stuff of pure fantasy with Afoa, for example, on less money than the departing BJ Botha will be earning at Munster.

Ulster’s improved bargaining power is down, in the main, to the improved husbandry and ambition which David Humphreys and chief executive Shane Long have brought to the province.

PS: Novak Djokovic is now only 8 to 1 for a calendar Grand Slam! The bookies don’t exactly give it away, but it must be on now.