IT’S DO OR die for Leinster and La Rochelle in Dublin today, but Ronan O’Gara’s men looked as though they didn’t have a care in the world as they ran through their Captain’s Run at Aviva Stadium yesterday evening.
O’Gara was one of the first out of the tunnel and for the most part kept an eye from a distance as his players ran through a series of non-contact passing drills, the sweetest offloads always met with hollers of appreciation that echoed around the empty stadium.
In between drills, tighthead prop Uini Atonio stepped away from the group to showcase his skillset, executing an impressive 50:22 before following the trick with a decent box-kick. Probably not a sign of what’s coming down the line today, but entertaining to watch nonetheless.
By the time he made it into the media room to meet a mixture of Irish and French press, the 34-year-old had switched his game-face on.
The Champions Cup is a competition this La Rochelle team love, and Leinster are a team they love to beat.
“Look, we’re a great team with a lot of young boys coming through, we’re looking to strive for the best,” said Atonio.
I know Leinster has been looking for that trophy for the last three or four years. But if they want to go for that trophy they have to go through us.”
The back-to-back European champions enjoyed an interesting build-up to the game, spending the early part of the week in Cork before heading up to road to Dublin.
“It was good, we got a bit of rain when we got here but the weather’s been real good, we trained in Cork with ROG’s old club, the boys got around the city to have food and a few drinks.
“I think they like us more than the Leinster boys!”
No doubt. If La Rochelle do get over the line again today, that decision to bring the squad to Cork will appear a masterstroke. By all accounts the players thoroughly enjoyed their time in O’Gara’s homeland, and the man himself admitted he was taken aback by the amount of goodwill that came his way throughout the week.
“The pre-planning was that if we got through Stormers that it made no sense to go to La Rochelle because it takes from Paris airport to La Rochelle, either by train or bus, is another six hours,” O’Gara explained.
“Six hours up and six hours back in the same week, you lose a training day. You can’t train once and beat Leinster at the weekend. So that was in our planning to give ourselves the best preparation.
“We had a light week but we got extremely well looked after in Fota. It’s a brilliant venue. The weather was miserable but Con were great, Fota was great.
We got out a bit. We got to mingle with the Cork public. It was just really refreshing to, I suppose, without sounding cocky obviously, just to see that you mean something to them and that was very, very nice from a personal point of view.”
O’Gara hopes the week together is conducive to a more rounded team performance today. La Rochelle have struggled for consistency this season and the former Munster player pointed to the lack of time the group have spent together across the campaign, highlighting the World Cup, Six Nations and recent Top 14 games which coincided with break periods for his internationals.
“They became available for Oyonnax [30 March] so we had them for that week and then the Stormers.
“We were not as cohesive as we’d like to be but I think we can hopefully skip a few steps by getting a good buzz by arriving in an unbelievable stadium with a full house and an unbelievably good sod that will hopefully bring back all the good memories of last May.”
What happened last May has informed almost every detail of what Leinster have been trying to do this season. With Jacques Nienaber now on board, everything has been geared towards finally winning that fifth Champions Cup title, a goal some the Leinster players have described as “an obsession” within the group.
We don’t yet know if La Rochelle still possess the hunger they did in the last two seasons. Winning titles can lead to complacency, or at the very least a more sated appetite for success, but O’Gara is confident his team remain fully motivated despite already scaling the Champions Cup mountain twice as a group.
“We want to go again, it’s deeper, it’s touchable, so the reality is in our language there is a team in our way [today], it happens to Leinster. And after that there will be two others.
“So with all due respect it’s an opposition we need to try take care of to get to where we want to go.
“They have their ambitions, and we respect that, but this team has done immense things and I don’t think we’re anywhere near our potential, so that excites me, but we’re aware that home advantage is huge and we need to be near our best.”
