TWELVE TRIES, 76 points on the board and a place in the United Rugby Championship semi-finals.
Leinster’s comprehensive defeat of a sorry Glasgow Warriors team at the RDS yesterday ticked a lot of boxes in terms of producing a positive response to Champions Cup heartache seven days previously, but head coach Leo Cullen was quick to play down the lopsided score.
He knows Glasgow had a shocker in Dublin 4, and that Friday’s semi-final opponents, the Bulls, will surely offer a sterner test.
While his team played some wonderful rugby against a sloppy, poorly disciplined Glasgow side, he’ll look more closely at an opening 14 minutes where his team struggled to get a foothold in the game, falling 7-0 behind within five minutes and looking every bit like a team trying to recover from a gut-wrenching experience.
Then Glasgow lock Richie Gray sent a feckless elbow into Jamison Gibson-Park’s face, and the game was done. Leinster hit Glasgow for three tries during Gray’s 10 minutes on the sideline and added another nine when the Warriors had 15 men on the pitch.
It was ruthless stuff against a visiting team who looked like they would rather take off early and join the queue at Dublin Airport; 76-14 is not the type of scoreline we should be seeing at this stage of the season in a knock-out game. It offered Leinster a nice path back to winning ways following that Champions Cup final defeat to La Rochelle, but little more. Cullen knew it, and you suspect his players did too.
“You can’t get carried away, realistically, can you? It’s about getting the job done and getting through to the next round,” Cullen said.
“We looked pretty nervy at the start, I thought. If you think, we don’t deal with the restart, give away a penalty, they put us into the corner – and to be fair to them they turned down the three (points) and went to the corner again and get over, so it’s 7-0 after less than 10 minutes.
“But it’s a big moment, the Richie Gray yellow card which leads to three tries for us during that 10 minutes, so I thought the guys were good in terms of capitalising there.
“What was pleasing was just the guys’ attitude this week. When you lose a big game, you want to get it out of your system and play again.”
The Leinster v Bulls game will be the first of the weekend’s semi-finals, a Friday night lights fixture at the RDS before Ulster make the long journey down to Cape Town to take on the Stormers the following day as Ireland’s best take on the pick of the South African franchises for a place in the URC final one week later.
“It’s good that we have another week in the season. It’s just trying to enjoy the time together and if we can do that for another week, great,” Cullen continued.
“If we can do it for another, even better, because the Bulls are a good side.
When I think back to watching them when I was younger – with Bakkies Botha and Victor Matfield – and that type of real power rugby that they play, that’s the great thing about their addition to the URC. So we get to see ourselves playing against them in a knock-out game, which will be a great challenge.”
On the injury front, Leinster will hope to have Tadhg Furlong available after the tighthead left the action with a back injury in the early stages of the second half, while it remains to be seen if any of Rónan Kelleher, Hugo Keenan, Johnny Sexton or James Lowe will come back into contention.
“Tadhg, his back was at him a little bit but I don’t think it’s anything major,” Cullen said.
“In terms of the guys that didn’t feature, we’ll see how those guys are, the four being Rónan, Hugo, Johnny and James. Nothing too major from today, not on first inspection anyway.”
Cullen summed it up nicely. Job done, on to the next one.
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