A WIN IS a win, but the overriding feeling inside the Aviva Stadium last night was that Leinster’s 15-7 success over Clermont was not one to be feeling overly merry about.
Faced with a limited yet determined Clermont team, Leinster’s attack struggled throughout while their lineout work repeatedly let them down. There were enough holes in the performance to leave the Leinster dressing feeling frustrated about their night’s work, despite maintaining their 100% start in the tournament.
Not that it was all bad. The above frustrations aside, it was a decent night for Jacques Nienaber as Leinster held the visitors scoreless for 75 minutes. Clermont provided the game’s opening score in the opening five minutes when Irae Simone’s kick triggered a move which ended with Alivereti Raka scoring from close range.
Clermont rarely threatened thereafter, with their forays into the Leinster half met with a strong defensive effort – including Andrew Porter’s exceptional effort to chase back and prevent an end-to-end counterattack score. The province’s scrum was also excellent, winning a series of important penalties to relieve Clermont pressure.
On the other side of the ball Sam Prendergast built on his fine showing in Bristol last weekend with a handful of decisive moments. He played a key role in both of Leinster’s tries before winning and scoring the penalty that provided their only points of the second half.
It wasn’t a perfect outing by the 21-year-old, who will be frustrated with two poor missed kicks to touch, but head coach Leo Cullen has been encouraged by how Prendergast led the team across what were his first two Champions Cup starts.
“Sam was good, yeah. Tricky conditions again and Clermont are a very, very physical team,” Cullen said.
“I thought there were some really good touches, particularly in the first half, a lovely bit of play for Gary’s [Ringrose] first try as an example. And again, you have a young 21-year-old 10 so he’s picking up experience there all the time. It’s fantastic.
“And it’s great to see the likes of Fintan Gunne coming off the bench for his Champions Cup debut, Andrew Osborne the same. So it’s just getting more and more experience into those younger players, and they’ve got to go through it.
“It wasn’t perfect tonight, it wasn’t perfect in parts last week. So there’s a hell of a lot of scope I think for us as a team to get better.
But listen, Sam is making great progress. Think to where he was this time last year, so many facets of his game that have kicked on to another level, and hopefully we’ll continue to see that progress now.”
It was more of a mixed night for Jordie Barrett, who started a game at fullback for the first time since November 2022. Making his home debut and first Leinster start, Barrett had some difficult moments in the first half but added some smart touches and took his try well – using his strength to power through two Clermont defenders to score Leinster’s second try.
“He’s got many strings to his bow,” said Cullen.
“You think even to the lead into his try where we obviously we go the length of the field, he picks up on a turnover, there’s some good scramble defence and then we go the length of the field and off that penalty in front of the posts we get in for a nicely worked try. And he got in for a try last week. It’s a great start for him in terms of his Leinster career.
“We’ve seen him play at 12 for 40 minutes and we’ve seen him play at 15 for 80 minutes. He’s probably more comfortable playing 12 just because that’s where he’s played more. So again, we’re starting that journey or whatever way you want to put it. It’s positive that he’s up and running as a Leinster player now.
“And again it’s just growing the collective understanding and that’s the challenge of this time of year where you have a group… Tyler coming as a new coach, there’s lots of freshness there in the group so it’s just making sure that we continue to work hard to build towards a more cohesive, complete performance.”
Fix the lineout and Leinster win that game comfortably with maybe a bonus point too. Lineout is a real concern and it’s worrying with the Irish team too.
@Brian O’Driscoll: It is not just about the hooker, but Sheehan returning in January / February will really help. The calling and collective understanding of the lineout is a more fundamental problem and one that is now clearly a Leinster-Ireland problem rather than just a Paul O’Connell or Robin McBryde/Leo Cullen problem. Maybe Paul and Leo should spend Christmas and New Year together and work on a solution. They were both excellent lineout callers, but they also had more than 1 hooker who could throw and a pack that they trusted.
@Paul Ennis: Did Ross Moloney call the lineout the last few years? I know Snyman is a quality player but Moloney was the ultimate club professional. Played most of the games in a season, did the job well. Didn’t really get enough recognition.
@mcdb06: I think he was, but Ryan was definitely being given more and more responsibility in that regard. I just don’t ever remember problems to this extent in the past – anywhere!
I think the solution is start giving teams a taste of their own medicine and teams will start backing off. Leinster and Ireland don’t compete at lineouts often enough. They invariably stay on the ground. Also, most of our attack plays come from the middle of the lineout. If we can develop plays of throws to the front of the lineout and the back, it would keep everybody guessing as we would be a credible threat off the front, middle and back.
@Conor Lynott: Interesting point. But I think it is more a case that Leinster and Ireland pick the lineouts to attack. There is a confidence in the defensive systems that they know they can defend lineout strike plays (mostly of the time). But even if we do attack the oppo lineout, I am not sure how that will result in them backing off from attacking our lineout. Just because we can find holes in their lineout doesn’t make our attacking lineout stronger. Am I missing something?
@Conor Lynott: You are right about the attacking plays off lineout though. There needs to be more variety. Difficult from the front of the lineout and from the back, once the ball crosses the 15, the lineout is over and the defence can close in making a strike play a little harder. But we defo need variety. More plays from the back of a maul maybe. We definitely need a little more deception as defences are finding us easy to read. A Cheslin Kolbe on the wing would keep defences honest too.
@Paul Ennis: It’s really about getting into people’s heads by competing every lineout. If you do that, offensively and defensively, all of a sudden confidence in the gameplan goes down when you get purchase off that. And if there’s one thing rugby players absolutely hate, it’s thinking on the fly. It’s exhausting. So it might not make them back off in terms of actually getting up in the air on Leinster throws, but if every throw is made into a contest, they won’t pick off as many of our throws because a lot of energy will have been spent securing their lineouts as well so accuracy will go down or some lineouts will go uncontested because they can’t keep doing that for 80 mins unless they keep the ball in hand more than planned for and kick the ball out less.