Scrum increasingly cause for Leinster concern

AFTER-MATCH REACTION: AN INCREASINGLY significant concern for Leinster is the wellbeing of their frontrow and their scrum. Early in the match Leinster's scrum was dominant. Then CJ van der Linde limped off with a foot injury and thereafter Stanley Wright was continually penalised. Of the two, the latter is the greater concern for Michael Cheika.

Operating at loosehead before his departure shortly after the half-hour mark, Van der Linde was merciless, and although Leinster's scrum remained on top, in addition to one indirect penalty, Wright was ultimately penalised three times with direct penalties for "not binding with the body but binding with the arm", according to Scottish referee Peter Allan.

Disconcertingly, the Cook Islands prop also came off worse with Peter Fitzgibbon in the Connacht game despite giving John Lynn a fearful time.

"I don't know, honestly," said Cheika when asked if he knew why Wright incurred Allan's wrath. "Last week we had an issue and I spoke to the referee about trying to get some clarity on what the issue is. I don't know if they've got a problem with Stan Wright or not, because it seems to be all coming down his way.

"If we have a dominant scrum, I'm not quite sure why we'd want to bring it down. That's in their hands. There is a bit of a thing across a lot of games now about that, not just ours. I watched Munster's game last night, and they got penalised a couple of times quite unfairly. It's something you've got to come to terms with with each individual referee."

While Cheika would be in the vast majority of coaches who are frustrated by refereeing interpretations at scrumtime, he admitted it is something Leinster now have to address urgently.

"We've got Christophe Berdos next week, and we've got to look at the way he referees the scrummage on video and sort ourselves out. That's going to be a big clash in the scrum, they've got a very good one. If you saw what happened in their last game, there were two penalty tries in the scrum, one to each team. It's happening in the Premiership as well as in the Magners League. There are issues in the scrum."

Van der Linde suffered a foot injury, as opposed to aggravating the calf problem that had sidelined him for the previous three games, and if, as forecast, he and Bernard Jackman are deemed fit next week, Cheika and his think tank will have a full hand to pick from for the first time this season.

While secondrow will be an interesting call, the backline permutations outside of Chris Whitaker are almost endless. Asked about the respective performances of Isa Nacewa and Felipe Contepomi at outhalf, Cheika hummed and conceded: "It was tricky, because the breeze was not as predictable as we would have liked. We thought we needed to play a bit more of a kicking game, but it sort of didn't turn out that way because the breeze almost swung around in the end."

Intriguingly too, Cheika hinted that he might be of a mind to re-unite Gordon D'Arcy with Brian O'Driscoll in midfield.

"I think he (D'Arcy) is about getting ready to come back to the centre. He's had a look on the wing, got a feel for it. He's ready to come back in. It's a totally different role, and he's hungry for it (the centre): he keeps trying to switch himself in there at training every chance he gets. We'll see as the week goes on."

While Rocky Elsom extolled the team's latest ability to win a close match, he conceded that "we didn't get into our rhythm, which has been a bit of a problem for us in a few games this year. Things went against us but we just picked ourselves up and kept scoring points, which was important.

"Even at the end there, when we thought we won the game and then they kicked a field goal, we got back into the match and got out ahead."

Leinster are not scaling the heights of October when they beat Wasps, admitted Elsom.

"Yeah, well, I think that we were just really on that day. I think that we still had some issues to work out, but things just fell our way and that happens. But I think that we have been slowly building since that Castres defeat and I think that, although you never want to lose - and you don't want to lose like that in particular - it shines a light on where we were falling down a little bit and we're working really hard on those areas. And you don't see them every week, because you don't always get the opportunities. But we know the things we need to address and we know what we need to do to make us win."

Next Saturday "will be a measure of our mettle", according to the Australian flanker, and the criticism after the Castres defeat is par for the course.

"I don't know about all the players, but you gotta be able to take criticism, and I think the harshest criticism you get is from inside the group. You live with them, whereas you can not read the papers, or you can throw them away.

"So whether you're feeling low on confidence or not, you've got to go out and do the business."