IT’S BEEN A rather low-key build up to the new season for Leo Cullen and his Leinster squad.

After a slightly unusual pre-season which saw Cullen enjoy the odd luxury of having a host of his senior players report back earlier than usual, Leinster booked in just one warm-up fixture before the new United Rugby Championship campaign gets underway.

And Friday’s 40-21 win over Harlequins at the Aviva Stadium more or less gave Cullen everything he would have wanted from a pre-season run-out. 

He watched his side race out the blocks with four first-half tries to wrap up the result by the break, before a rather disjointed second period allowed his bench players to get some valuable minutes into their legs. 

Perhaps most importantly, Leinster got some long-term absentees back on the pitch. Johnny Sexton stole the show with a superb 40-minute cameo on his first game back in five months, while the likes of Max Deegan and Conor O’Brien made welcome returns from long-term injuries.

All in all, Cullen feels his squad are set up nicely ahead of the 25 September URC opener against the Bulls.

“Great for those guys (coming back from injury),” Cullen said. “Really, really pleasing, hopefully they can kick on at this point.

“We sort of went in with a little bit of a plan going into the game, it doesn’t always play out how you think it will. 

“The plan for us was to try and manage certain individuals, we changed the front five at half time, Ross (Byrne) coming on for Johnny (Sexton) as well and obviously trying to limit a few other guys to 50 or 60 minutes.

“I thought the intensity in the first half from both teams (was really good), you could see they’re going fully at it, the intensity dipped out a bit in the second half but plenty of good stuff in the first half, you could see guys were pretty full throttle, particularly in that first 15 minutes.

“Generally speaking, the group are very, very driven, and want to kick on now.”

Intensity felt like the key word in Cullen’s post-game debrief. The Leinster head coach is wary that while their pre-season preparations have motored along nicely, the Bulls will be coming in hot after a string of strong performances in the Currie Cup.

Jake White’s side impressed in their semi-final win over Western Province, with a superb first-half display, before thrashing the Sharks 44-10 in Saturday’s decider – making it three trophies from four tournaments since September of last year. 

“They’ve a big advantage because they have a group of players together that will have strong cohesion and that’s probably one thing that we are trying to achieve at the moment,” Cullen continued.

The Bulls in particular bring a real power game, very similar to the way South Africa would have approached the Lions. Very strong set-piece. We’ve come up against Jake White when he was with Montpellier and had some good ding-dong battles with them. It’s very much a power-based game that they come with, so we’ve got to make sure we understand that type of threat and how we go about trying to nullify that and impose our own game.” 

Leinster now have two weeks to prepare for that season opener at the Aviva, with Cullen hoping to get some of his returning internationals back into the mix, however the province’s Lions contingent are not expected to return until rounds 4/5 of the URC.

“We’ll have a few more players coming back, but that’s a challenge, trying to get guys up to speed very, very quickly. 

“So the next couple of weeks are huge for us in terms of how we go about our preparation. The Bulls have that advantage of building cohesion over the last X amount of weeks they’ve been together, a fair chunk of time.

“They’ve pretty much gone Rainbow Cup through to Currie Cup, played a semi-final last weekend and a final this weekend against the Sharks, so we’ll have a look over that game and try and put a plan in place for a couple of weeks time.”

Finally, Cullen was coy when asked about speculation that Cian Healy has been trying his hand at tighthead during pre-season, smiling through his brief response.

“We don’t comment on speculation. We’ll have to see… It’s all speculation at this point in time.” 

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