LEINSTER COACH LEO Cullen admitted it’s tough to see his side qualifying for the knock-out stages of the Champions Cup following their 19-16 defeat to Bath.
The result at the Rec means Leinster have opened their European campaign with back-to-back losses and have a single match point after two rounds. With two ties against champions Toulon to come in December, the outlook is grim.
Cullen refused to say that Leinster are completely out of the running, however, pointing out that the postponement of last weekend’s scheduled clash between Toulon and Bath at Stade Mayol means the pool remains alive.
“It’s going to be tough, it’s going to be tough from here,” said Cullen in a post-match interview with BT Sport Europe. “That’s being realistic. It’s hard to say right now because of the fact that one of the games in the pool has already been called off.
“Until you really know what points come out of that game, it’s going to be hard to say. We just turn our attention to the league now and we’ll re-asses in a couple of weeks time. It’s an exciting challenge to go down to Toulon. We’ve only one point from two games, so it is going to be a huge challenge for sure.”
Leinster’s scrum was dismantled by Bath, for whom loosehead prop Nick Auterac was man of the match. Much of the English side’s scoring stemmed from success at scrum time, with their only five pointer of the contest a penalty try at the set-piece.
Referee Jérôme Garcès was left with easy decisions around the scrum as Leinster retreated alarmingly on several occasions, backing up the poor performance in this area against Wasps last weekend with another damaging performance.
“We’ve got four international props there, so it was a bad day at the office,” said Cullen. “Bath, I think, are one of the better scrums in Europe, so we knew it was going to be a tough challenge. We’ll dust ourselves off again and we’ve got another game in the Pro12 on Friday against Ulster.
“Ulster had a disappointing result last night as well, so I’m sure they’ll be coming to Dublin looking for a result. It’s back to the Pro12 for the next couple of weeks and then post that, we can turn our attention to Toulon.”
Cullen said he was proud of the effort his team showed against Bath, particularly in fighting back into the game after the penalty try. The Leinster head coach also reiterated attention must now turn swiftly to Friday’s Pro12 meeting with Ulster in Dublin.
“I thought the guys put in a lot of effort out there. I couldn’t fault them there at all,” said Cullen. “A couple of time we got ourselves in good positions and just weren’t clinical enough, some of it a little bit of execution at times as well.
We gave away a lot of penalties and points with the scrum, so they’re probably the areas that cost us the game.
“After we gave away the penalty try, it would have been easy for us to fold up, but the guys have a lot of fighting spirit and came back really strong. I thought we were going to push on at that stage because as we were into that last 10 minutes I thought we looked the stronger team.
“But credit goes to Bath, they fought their way back in and off that missed penalty kick, they ran the ball back well as us, got another scrum penalty and obviously Fordy (George Ford) showed good composure to nail that kick at the end.”
