On a routine Monday at Dublin Airport as a dejected Wales team shuffled through security, fans from the fanatical fringe of the Red Dragon Brotherhood greeted them with a spontaneous sound. They burst into a song, not of praise but damnation.

Thirteen unanswered points suggested they could take a red card on the chin and still win, as they had done despite CJ Stander’s against the Springboks in Cape Town five years ago

Munster didn’t merely win the apparently un-winnable; they won it, to borrow a bit of racing parlance, going away

Weekend takeaways from the European Champions Cup

Over the last 10 years pre-Covid, three clubs monopolised the Heineken Champions’ Cup: Leinster, Saracens, Toulon

Had he been in a different place at a different time, Johnny Sexton’s glaring strop over his premature exit in Paris would probably have cost him the captaincy

Another title title slips from the grasp of the team playing the best rugby

Of all the painful images from a Champions’ Cup weekend of double Irish capitulation, the most revealing centred on Leinster’s unmasking as the best team in Europe.