Matt Williams: Ronan O’Gara’s intellect can unlock Toulouse’s few weaknesses

In America, they are called “Monday Morning Quarterbacks”. Those who have all the answers on how the weekend’s game should have been won after they have been played.

This Monday, when the new Champions Cup winner has been crowned, let's hope there is a better perspective on the defeated team than when Leinster lost to an excellent La Rochelle in the semi-finals.

For more than a decade, Leinster have been competing and winning at the business end of the Heineken Cup while regularly fielding 21 players who were born and bred in the province. The only other place on the globe you will find statistics comparable to that is in New Zealand.

The post-match gloom about Leinster being "outmuscled again and forever" was at best overly pessimistic and at worst fuelled by some jealous prejudice that the D4 strollers got a good old bashing at the hands of a team coached by a Munster legend.

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Great wisdom

I get it, but it remains an unjust summation for Leinster. In their previous game against Exeter at Sandy Park, they completely outpowered the reigning English and Champions Cup champions in one of the club's greatest ever performances. Exeter have one of the most feared packs in Europe and Leinster tore them to shreds.

Leinster’s defeat, in an away semi-final impacted by the pandemic, can be placed in the same category created by my old Eastwood RFC coach who said: “Sometimes you just get beat by a better bunch on the day.” Poor grammar but great wisdom.

Like Leinster, a defeat for La Rochelle in today’s final should not take the gloss from the excellent coaching Ronan O’Gara has conducted with a club that has perennially underperformed until his arrival. Like every club, La Rochelle want to win both the Champions Cup and league trophy, the Top 14s Bouclier de Brennus, but rugby does not always have fairy tale endings.

The Beauty takes off with the Beast's best mate and Prince Charming meets a girl in a bar so Snow White never gets kissed. She dies.

The rugby intellect of O'Gara may also be able to unlock the few weaknesses that sit within Toulouse

Welcome to professional sport. Just ask Yoann Huget. A few weeks ago, the legendary Toulouse winger announced his retirement, hoping to end his career with games in both the Champions Cup and Top 14 finals. In the opening minutes of Toulouse's next game, he tore his Achilles' tendon. Career over.

To defeat Toulouse, La Rochelle will require tactics as intelligent as those they devised for their semi-final that empowered them to dominate the gain line in both attack and defence.

Make no mistake, La Rochelle’s tactics against Leinster were brilliant. My favourite was how O’Gara played the referee to perfection. The English referees in the knockout stages have been so manically obsessed with penalising every tiny technical infringement at the tackle that the defensive offside lines have become lawless.

The genius for La Rochelle was they competed with such ferociousness at the tackle they forced referee Matthew Carley to focus his total attention on the tackle contest. While behind his back, the La Rochelle defenders were regularly offside, allowing them to contain Leinster's attack well behind the gain line.

Great tactics, excellent planning and super smart rugby. Performed with energy for 80 minutes, that gave La Rochelle a famous victory. O’Gara take a bow. In old La Rochelle town, he is now regarded as Le Grand Fromage. The Big Cheese.

La Rochelle will have to find a similar Grand Fromage plan for today’s match. Toulouse are a different beast than Leinster. They have returned to their club’s traditional technique of running rugby, devised in the late 1960s, but to this day it remains a work of genius.

To put it simply, Toulouse want to keep the ball at chest level. To go to ground with the ball is to break down and fail. They keep the ball on the move with spontaneity and off-loading, playing at a high tempo.

What is not widely spoken about is that Toulouse have the best performing forward pack in the Champions Cup. Hiding under the giant shadow cast by the X-factor brilliance of their diminutive superstars, Cheslin Kolbe, Antoine Dupont and Romain Ntamack lurks their dominating, hulking pack.

Forward battle

For La Rochelle, the game will be lost or won in the forward battle. La Rochelle must get quality ball from set play and stop the Toulouse ball-carrying forwards from finding space. The rugby intellect of O’Gara may also be able to unlock the few weaknesses that sit within Toulouse.

In the chaos of a pandemic-impacted season that has seen the semi-final matches determined by pulling names out of a hat, English officiating that has bordered on the diabolical and two French teams reaching the final only to switch the venue from Marseille to London, it's hard to make logical predictions.

Logic says Toulouse should prevail but in such an unprecedented season, why not a Munster legend, via Racing 92 and Canterbury, now a novice head coach, to guide a perennial also-ran club to victory, over French and European royalty at Twickenham to lift the Heineken Cup?

If all that seems highly unlikely, don’t worry. It will be much simpler after the game when Monday’s quarterbacks explain it all for you.