European defeat sharpens Leinster’s focus on Glasgow

There isn’t much Dan Sheehan can say, although he’s trying his best. Leinster lost half of their season’s set goals last weekend against La Rochelle in Marseilles. The other half are at the mercy of next weekend. Glasgow in the URC quarter-final and in the blessed RDS.

One of the favourite go-to thoughts from the player’s phrase book is to ‘turn the page’. This week has been harder than most. A fifth star snatched in the final two minutes and a season that could be snatched within six days of that by a Scottish side that have had two weeks to prepare. For Sheehan, for Leinster ,it is all about winning now. And turning the page – that’s not easy.

“I find it hard, yeah,” says the Irish hooker, who came into the match after 14 minutes. “The last few days at home when maybe you are left with your own thoughts, and maybe could you have influenced it. Know what I mean. Then I think today, just being with the lads again, getting back on to the pitch and doing…we’d a good session and cleared the head, great energy brought to the session, which allowed the focus to shift.

“It was sad the last two days,” he adds. “Quite nice being back in the building. We made sure to stay close to each other. Everyone was reflecting on their own parts of the game, and what maybe they could have done that would have had the impact. Yeah, quite a hard one to get the head around. Within the group our goal was to do the double. One of them is gone now.”

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Residual disappointment has been hanging over the club for the last few days. And moving from that energy-sapping, calamitous mood – and in Leinster’s eyes it was just that – to a more positive footing to salvage the season needs to be a structured procedure. Not everybody can be allowed or trusted to process at their own pace. Another from the coaching playbook is that they remember defeats more clearly than wins.

Carrying around Marseilles forever is a definite possibility for some players and staff. But carrying it around for the next five days with Glasgow smelling, if not weakness despondency, is not permissible.

“It was a pretty quick turnover to make sure we are ready for Glasgow,” says Sheehan. “The last thing we need now is to get stuck on what happened on Saturday and rock up to the RDS on Saturday and have Glasgow, who have had the last two weeks to prep for us and they know what’s coming. I think the Glasgow game will now set the tone of the rest of the campaign.

“We made sure yesterday when we came in to address it. I don’t think you completely forget about it. We needed to make sure we were taking the lessons from it. If you left it people would be thinking of different things..... I think when you go over some mistakes individually, collectively, it just allows you to get it off your chest and you need to completely move on after. That is what we’ve been trying to do now. Coming in today, had the review yesterday, it’s completely turned the page, to be honest with you.”

You can understand Leinster’s dilemma. They have been the team everyone has talked about throughout the season. They have been winning matches by large margins and they have provided Ireland with more players than all the other provinces combined. They have the most influential group and in-form individuals, and now Glasgow, without grand European distractions, threaten to swing into Dublin like a seasonal wrecking ball.

“Yeah, definitely,” says Sheehan. “Like, so far this season has been great for us, and we don’t want to have nothing to show for it at the end. We got to a Champions Cup final, which was great. Obviously we didn’t win. But if we let it slip now and give up on the season it’s pointless, because the whole season will be marked off as a dud.

“So I think it’s incredibly important that we make sure we focus on the Glasgow game so that we can roll in three weeks in a row and hopefully win three weeks in a row.”

Sheehan believes “there is maybe a few lessons in there for us” and that at least Leinster “have a chance to end our season on a high” and that in Marseille there were “maybe some big moments in the game which shifted momentum”.

It’s a rough business rebounding and picking over the carcass, hoping it can provide for the next challenge.