Heineken Cup Munster v Leinster:A BLOODSHOT RIGHT eye and a red swoosh like a comet tail arching upwards from the corner across his forehead gave Leo Cullen quite a post-match war mask. The work load of an international secondrow is rarely genteel and Cullen knows something about life at the bottom of a ruck.

But the hand seen clawing across his face as players scrambled for possession after half-time, as well as Cullen’s anguished reaction as he fell backwards to the ground with his eye closed, suggested the Leinster captain was furious with what had just taken place. After the match omerta prevailed.

This was Leinster’s moment of reflective joy at deposing the European champions, not one of recrimination. The optics being so ugly, there were others in the press room under the stand in Croke Park, who believed the incident required further ventilation.

“Can you just talk us through the Alan Quinlan incident,” the Leinster captain was asked. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I’ve been asked about it already and to tell the truth I actually don’t know.”

“What was the subject of your conversation at the final whistle?” “Wishing Quinny the best of luck on the Lions,” he smiled.

“But you seemed to take issue that something untoward happened?” “I don’t know,” replied Cullen. “I don’t really want to comment about it, to be honest with you . . . like a lot of stuff happens in rugby matches. It’s a physical sport. That’s just the nature of the game, you know.”

There the issue was left. The captain preferred to cautiously bask in one of Leinster’s best performances in memory. Cullen also spoke for many when he agreed with the notion that the age profile of the team requires Leinster to move quickly or condemn some of their brightest talents to look back on this era as one of lost opportunity.

“Leinster is traditionally a target of many people,” reflected Cullen. “I’m not too sure what that is about but we’re just going out every week, this group of players. We were happy with winning the league last year, disappointed with our form.

“In Europe our home games were fine but on the road we were pretty poor, to be fair. Europe is what we targeted most this year. A bit messy in getting out of our group at times but into the quarterfinals we had a bit of a scrappy win against ’Quins . . . we’re just trying to give ourselves a chance every week and play to the best of our ability and be a bit more dogged.

“But there’s a lot of internal pressure with the group. Some guys have been around for a while and for some of us, we’re running out of chances, I guess, running out of years in terms of being successful. We very excited about the prospect of winning another trophy for the second year in a row.”

While Brian O’Driscoll earned man of the match, Cullen’s input, his understated commanding role, especially around the breakdown and in the trenches, could easily have earned him the accolade. Jamie Heaslip, Rocky Elsom, Malcolm O’Kelly made it happen just as much. It is there, where those small battles won all around the ground count for so much, that Cullen saw how slim the win really was. Forget the scoreboard.

“The scoreline doesn’t actually reflect the closeness of the game,” he explained. “When we played Munster this season, they sort of won by similar scorelines in both of the games and I don’t really believe those scorelines reflect the games either. There’s always very fine margins.

“The games we played them this year I don’t think we’ve been particularly clinical in taking opportunities and I think that’s the big difference. We took opportunities today and the scoreline, 25-6, isn’t a reflection of how tight the game was. They ran away comfortably in the other games on the scoreboard but they were pretty close battles, I would have thought.”

The former Leicester player has been to a Heineken Cup final before, liked the look and feel of the thing but didn’t like the taste in his mouth coming second.

“I’ve got a Heineken Cup loser’s medal at home already and it’s not something you bandy around the place and display with great pride, so, yeah, it’s important,” he says. “I’m pretty keen not to have a second one. I want to go on and win another trophy. We’ve a couple of weeks to build up to that game.” So it went. Canned emotions until the Murrayfield final delivers the ultimate prize.