Here are Leinster’s realities.
Every season since 2018, when Leinster last won the Champions Cup, they have been the second or equal third best club in Europe.
They have lost five finals since then.
How Bordeaux outfoxed Leinster + URC quarter-finals preview
Over that time frame, Leo Cullen has won more games than any other coach in the Champions Cup.
READ MORE
In that same period, Leinster have dominated the URC, topping the table on five occasions and winning the tournament four times. That is a record unmatched by any other club in Europe.
But Leinster have lost five Champions Cup finals.
Last Saturday, Bordeaux-Bègles selected two Australians, a Tongan, a Fijian, a South African and several top-quality French players, including Damian Penaud, who were developed by other clubs.
Leinster fielded 21 players from their own province.
Leinster’s performances in European rugby over the past eight years have been driven by home-grown playing and coaching talent in numbers that are unprecedented, extraordinary and admired the world over.
But they have lost five finals.
How do we accurately judge this outrageously successful and talented group that have won so many games, displayed so much fight and courageous resilience, but have lost five massively important finals?
No single person has done more for Leinster than Cullen. He is the most influential person in the club’s history. While Brian O’Driscoll is by far the club’s most outstanding player, Cullen has spent two decades working to unleash the massive potential that many of us knew existed in the capital.
I hear people say “the fans” want Cullen gone.
If you are a Leinster supporter and you believe that Cullen and Leinster have not given you one hell of a ride, packed with entertainment, excitement and value for money across the URC and the Champions Cup in the past seven years, then perhaps your sense of entitlement might need a haircut.
In 2025, after winning the Uefa Europa League, Tottenham Hotspur sacked their Australian manager, Ange Postecoglou, because their fans wanted more success. Last weekend, they were one loss away from relegation. How is that decision looking for them now?
None of that means Cullen and his assistant coaches are beyond criticism, or that Leinster don’t require a serious change of tactics.
In the sweltering heat of Bilbao, it was obvious that both Leinster’s attacking and defensive systems required a major overhaul.
The Leinster attack coach, Tyler Bleyendaal, produced a plan that was predictable, one-dimensional and asked so few questions of the Bordeaux defence that it allowed the French club to make a staggering 215 tackles with a success rate of 93 per cent.
Until Ciarán Frawley entered the game, the attack crabbed across the pitch, going from side to side. Frawley straightened up the attack by challenging the defensive line. He was not perfect. He isolated himself on several occasions, but he was direct.
The lowest point of Leinster’s attack was when they were awarded a five-metre scrum on Bordeaux’s try line. Only moments earlier, we had witnessed the French team deliver a masterful, try-scoring, backline attack from the same scenario.
Bordeaux showed us they had analysed Leinster’s high-risk scrum defence and produced a move that completely outflanked it. Displaying spectacular backline skills, they moved the ball wide, where Leinster are weak, and into the hands of Pablo Uberti, who trotted over to score.
From the same five-metre scrum scenario, all Leinster could muster was for Caelan Doris to pick up the ball at the back of the scrum and run headlong into the Bordeaux defence. It was one of many mindlessly unambitious attacking plays.
As always, defence wins championships, and it was Bordeaux’s defence that triumphed as Leinster’s collapsed.
Any defensive system that leaks 41 points in a final is mortally wounded. All season myself and several other former Leinster players have predicted the failure of the current defensive system against fast and skilled opponents.
Sadly, Bordeaux proved that theory true.
There is no doubt Jacques Nienaber is a fine coach. His defensive system has won World Cups. However, he is not the first coach who has tried to take a system that worked with a high degree of success at one organisation to another club and found it was not transferable.
The hard reality for Cullen and Nienaber is that Leinster’s defensive system is no longer fit for purpose and must be either discarded or deeply modified. To continue with Nienaber’s current system is a folly and will lead to another catastrophic failure somewhere down the line.
Cullen’s coaching structure empowers his assistant coaches with a great deal of autonomy. Much of the responsibility for last weekend’s performance rests on the shoulders of Bleyendaal and Nienaber.
Here is the last of Leinster’s realities.
After every final this team has lost, they have been ridiculed and written off. Yet somehow, year after year, they have dragged themselves off the canvas and got back into the fight. They have displayed heart, courage and grit in circumstances that would have broken most other sporting organisations.
After all of my technical finger-pointing, therein is the mystery that rests at the heart of this great club.
I believe that across the next few weeks, Leinster will go on to win another URC title.
As the Americans say, go figure.
