THE CHAMPIONS CUP remains an itch James Lowe is yet to fully scratch.
Leinster’s last Champions Cup title came back in 2018, at the end of Lowe’s first season with the club. Despite impressing in his first year in blue the winger was left out of the squad for the Bilbao final meeting with Racing 92, with the restrictions on selecting ‘non-European players’ resulting in Lowe missing out as Scott Fardy and Jamison Gibson-Park got the nod in the matchday 23.
The former Chiefs player was then on the pitch when Leinster lost the 2019 final to Saracens, and also started the 2022 and 2023 defeats to La Rochelle, with a couple of knock-out game losses wedged in between.
This year, he’s hoping for a better outcome. Coming off the back of a strong Six Nations – playing every minute across Ireland’s five games – Lowe made a try-scoring return with Leinster in last Friday’s win against the Bulls and is looking forward to getting stuck into European action again, cutting a typically relaxed figure as he settles into his seat in the Leinster media room, where he’s surrounded by various trophies and a mural of the province’s previous title-winning squads.
“Yeah, we are coming into the important end of the season,” Lowe says.
“The only way you measure it at the end, whether it’s been a good season or not, is trophies. We have been in this position before and come up short.
I’ve lost three different finals so far at Champions Cup level, so that’s a pretty shit stat to have.
“It’s one game at a time. That’s the cliché. We are crossing all the T’s and dotting all the I’s to make sure we understand Leicester in the buildup. Come Saturday hopefully we have trained enough and watched enough not to be surprised at anything.”
This year the province are once again tracking in the right direction, recording some impressive wins during the pool stages and warming up for Saturday’s round of 16 meeting with Leicester Tigers [KO 8pm, RTÉ/TNT Sports] by sticking seven tries on a strong Bulls team.
As always, Leinster’s season will be defined by what happens during the run-in but there is a different feel around the province this season, with Johnny Sexton now retired and Jacques Nienaber stepping into the ‘senior coach’ role vacated by Stuart Lancaster last summer.
Nienaber will have been glad to get the full group back under his watch after the Six Nations but Lowe says the squad have already built a good understanding of what the two-time World Cup winner expects from them.
“Stu would have done a bit of everything,” Lowe explains.
He would have dipped in and out of the attack and the phase shape and the ‘D’. Jacques is mainly a defensive mastermind and he has brought in a completely different defensive system and it is working.
“I can understand why South Africa were so successful under him. They’re different [Lancaster and Nienaber] but they are both world-class in their own right.
“Stu, Goody [Andrew Goodman, attack coach] and Jacques are all crazy in their own minds because they are all kind of head coaches and they are all just nutters.
“The amount of games they watch is sickening. The amount of replays of different, shapes that teams would run, little trick plays…they have folders and folders of… I wouldn’t watch a quarter of what they watch. I wouldn’t watch that much in fairness. But those guys, they put in some shift to prepare us and make sure we understand what’s coming.
“Those boys are mental. I would not want to be a rugby coach at the highest level by any means.”
Lowe’s role in Leinster’s new, aggressive defensive system is crucial, but the winger has taken the change in his stride, having long moved past the defensive issues which coloured some of his first Ireland caps.
“It’s tough in any defensive system now for wings because 10s literally make decisions based on what the nines do and what the wingers do. And as a winger, for me to simplify it, I just follow my centres. If he goes in I go in. If he stays out I stay out. That’s how you get the balance.
“How we defend here [at Leinster], it’s the linespeed. It’s pretty self-explanatory. Winning the collisions makes it a lot easier. You can find ways to chill out when you need to. It does ask a lot of the wingers but this is the toughest environment and if you don’t perform you don’t get picked. I’m happy out learning a new defensive system, it’s going good.”
The 31-year-old is now a very different player to the one that arrived at Leinster back in 2017. He’s always had the X-factor finishing ability and a good left boot, but Leinster and Ireland have asked different things of him. Lowe takes pride in how much he’s improved as a defender since moving to this side of the world.
“Oh yeah, I can’t complain. No-one is trying to give me shit anymore. That’s always good,” Lowe says.
“I was always a bit joué and in New Zealand there probably wasn’t as much focus on it [defending] as there is now.
“I’ve also been seriously lucky to work with some of the best centres in the world. Even having Sexto, weirdly enough, as my 10. He would say ‘I just look at you and whatever you do I do the opposite so, if you can be as patient as you can, then it just makes my job so much the easier’.
“So getting good reads and getting good profiles in the tackle and managing to hit some people, so it’s going alright.”
