O’Connor pushing for a complete performance
Chances are that some tired old cliches will be trotted out about 5.30pm today when Castres go about fulfilling their obligations against a Leinster side expected to amass at least four tries and five points.
Bad travellers. Disinterested in Europe. Both observations are true, even if they haven’t given the entire first-team the weekend off, but they are accusations that shouldn’t be swept over the wider French landscape anymore.
Only Castres and Montpellier, both of whom lie bottom of their respective pools, approach round five of the inaugural rugby Champions Cup with the air of dead men walking. That leaves four of their compatriots very much in the mix.
Toulon, Clermont and Toulouse all sit at the summits of their respective piles while a Racing Metro side devoid of Jonathan Sexton’s services for now sit one point behind Northampton, but hardly for long, given they face Treviso at home tomorrow.
That European form is mirrored at home, where Castres sit second from bottom in the Top 14. Montpellier lie mid-table knowing they could also find themselves immersed in a relegation battle every bit as quick as a push for the play-offs.
So, going AWOL in Europe may be distasteful but emptying their ammo on such manoeuvres would be grounds for court martial given their circumstances and Leinster coach Matt O’Connor doesn’t believe that is in any way devaluing the competition.
“Not really,” he explained. “It’s the reality and the dynamics that are at play. There is no point wasting your resources when the stakes are so high in your domestic league and then you’ve got to make sure that you stay in the Top 14.”
What is surprising about all this is that a Castres side that was good enough to win the Top 14 two seasons ago, and which lost the final to Toulon last summer, should find itself wallowing in the basement halfway into the season.
The departure of some key players has played its part in blunting their spears and undermining the foundations of success at a club that lacks the financial firepower, stadium capacity and population base of the big guns.
“Castres have a pretty light squad in relation to numbers so blokes play a lot of rugby and hence they rely on a lot of the same combinations which are better,” said O’Connor. “They’ve got a really good culture and success recently.
“They’ve had a couple of injuries early in the campaign as well. They lost a couple of games at home early in the Top 14, which you just can’t afford to do because that drops you down there.”
Two wins from their last three domestic fixtures allows Castres to detach from survival mode for this European diversion in good spirits, but they haven’t won on the road all season and they rolled over for Wasps twice last month.
Eleven times they have played in Europe’s top competition and the one and only occasion they punched through the pool stages was back in 2002 when Munster, whom they had met in the group stage, saw them off in the semi-final.
All of which is more than enough to breed no little amount of confidence among Leinster’s following this afternoon. Players and coaches are approaching it all with more caution and, in fairness, they have reason to.
The sides have met five times already in Europe and only once, in their first meeting at the same ground in December 2008 when Leinster won 33-3, has the process been anything like straightforward for the Irish side.
Leinster have never managed to put four tries on Castres, however. The try count actually stands at just 9-7 in Leinster’s favour and Castres were far better than even a 19-7 scoreboard suggested when they visited Dublin early last season.
That said, Leinster have won all five encounters to date and Castres’s lacklustre performance losing 49-13 away to Stade Francais last weekend showed how accommodating they can be in games where they don’t expect much change.
Their attitude may not be much better today.
“It’s hard to say,” said O’Connor. “From our end, it’s totally uncontrollable. It’s irrelevant. We need to make sure that we arrive at the RDS in the right mindset to deliver a performance that gets us as many points out of the game as possible.
"Given the form that we have shown and the bodies that have come back into the environment and the growth in our game over the last couple of weeks, that’s all that is important to us. That we deliver a quality 80 minutes and get out of it whatever we get out of it.”
