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The heat is on: Leinster under pressure to perform

A nice trip across the Irish Sea can lift all the pressure off the Cardiff Blues. Leinster are heavy favourites and to keep focus they have had to protest against any talk of ‘no hope’ for their guests.

IT MUST BE quite nice for Cardiff Blues coach, Justin Burnell, to get his team out of the Welsh capital this weekend.

Sure, the last trip was marred by his most recognisable player ending his tenure at 30,000 feet.

And they are unlikely to party like it’s 1999 if they achieve anything less than victory, not again.

This week has been a tale of three cities for Burnell, beginning with those infamous celebrations which followed their apparently indifferent 30-3 defeat in Glasgow.

Losing Gavin Henson to his own, well… Gavin Henson-ness was never likely to weaken the visitors much  - in fact his presence on the field is often a lightning rod to a partizan crowd-  but arriving in such a blaze of publicity, when one of the world’s finest centres was to be subsequently ruled out on top of the indomitable Sam Warburton, it turned into a disaster.

Scrutiny in Wales is suffocating; coming to Dublin will be a release. The Blues will enter the action like a touring side without a care in the world. Nobody expects them to win against the reigning Heineken Cup champions.

Leo Cullen has seen it all before: this time last year, he cut a much more relaxed figure. The training gear and runners were consistent, but his legs were stretched out from under the press conference table.

It was only his former club, the Leicester Tigers, coming to town. No biggie, all in a day’s work.

On message

On Thursday, Cullen was right on message. Making sure there was nothing laid back in his appearance, the lock stoically sat upright facing the press and stopped short of calling the Blues a ‘banana-skin’. Instead he and Joe Schmidt underlined and emphasised the respect they hold for the visiting threat.

Brian O’Driscoll had set the tone early in the week: accepting the ‘favourites’ tag, but focusing only on the job in hand.

Queries about Henson and Jamie Roberts were batted away. Instead he turned the focus away from the good doctor onto his opposite number, one of a number of impressive weapons in the visitors’ arsenal.

“Casey Laulala is an incredibly underrated player.” Gushed BOD, determined not to give any fuel to the opponent, “Personally, I think he’s one of the best outside centres I’ve come across in my career and I think he has the ability to change a game.”

“As a centre pair they were extremely dangerous, but they’ve got (Alex) Cuthbert coming back who had a great Six Nations. Leigh Halfpenny, a really in-form player. Gethin Jenkins, probably one of the best loose-heads in the world – So, guys that have huge experience, but also a mixture of guys with youthful exuberance who don’t know what it’s like to lose in a Heineken Cup quarter-final.”

That kind of young fearlessness from Cuthbert, the wrecking ball on the wing will be to the Blues’ advantage.

It’s not difficult to find good things to say about Cardiff’s squad or even their recent European record. Their 2008 41-17 quarter-final drubbing was permissible because it was away in Toulouse – and they would exact revenge in the same stage of the competition a year later.

In the 2009 semi-final, they pushed Leicester to the oddity of a penalty shoot-out where the great Martyn Williams hooked a kick left before Jordan Crane nailed his and turned to give an Indian call to his grateful fellow Tigers.

Since then, the Blues have succeeded where Munster failed by dropping into the Amlin Challenge Cup and going all the way, shocking Toulon in the final.

Deadpan

Yet, for all that talent, this remains Europe’s underachieving team and the Blues as a club have allowed themselves to grow accustomed with Heineken Cup failure.

No matter how much you raise the good points, and no matter how much Leinster talk up their guests. Cardiff will take the field in the Aviva with nothing to lose as massive underdogs and their Welsh internationals will have the confidence of three consecutive wins over Ireland safely stored in the locker. So they do have a chance.

The eastern province will be the only side under severe scrutiny today, but they are top of the European tree because they never settle for the high standards already set.

This week Schmidt was about to field a question relating to his unbeaten record in knock-out competition when his captain twisted his long neck to the right:

“Well, you lost the Magners League final last year” deadpanned Cullen, half under his breath, half so the world could hear.

The reigning champions are under pressure to perform, pressure to deliver in front of a packed house in Dublin 4.

But hey, they’ve seen all this before.

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