'Create your own reality': Jacques Nienaber has carried Anthony Foley's message with him 

Nienaber spent 16 months in Limerick before following Erasmus back home in a successful attempt to rebuild a Springboks side that has won the last two World Cups. Some of Foley’s philosophy has fed into his own work in the decade since.

“The last message Axel had to the squad was, you create your own reality,” said Nienaber. “That's probably something that I took into my career.

“Like, listen, whatever you say it's going to be, it's going to be. If you say you're not going to make it, you're not going to make it. If you say you're going to make it, you're going to make it. So you create your own reality, whatever that is.” 

Leinster have looked to do just that in the eight years since they last won the Champions Cup. In fact, their efforts to win the trophy again have aped the saga Rory McIlroy went through for so long before winning his first Masters.

The Northern Irishman tried everything to break his duck at Augusta. He arrived early and absorbed it all in. He arrived last-minute and played it like a regular stop on the PGA Tour. And he tried everything in between those two polar opposites.

Leinster came agonisingly close to winning this tournament with a blindingly effective attack. And they changed tack entirely by bringing Nienaber in and prioritising a blitz defence that has been breached in some of the biggest games.

They have declared their ambition to win that fifth star baldly, some players going as far as to label it an obsession. Now, after so much heartache in the tournament, they are approaching it in more circumspect fashion. Publicly, at least.

So it is with Nienaber when asked about their prospects this term.

“You're not entitled to go all the way, and nobody is entitled to go all the way, because Leinster have a good squad but so does Bordeaux, so does Toulouse, so does the Bulls.

“If you go and you ask a Bulls fan, or coach would he swap for any of Leinster's players, there's maybe three, but they're happy with the squad.

“The same with Bordeaux. If you ask a Bordeaux fan would you take Gibson-Park but then you have to give Lucu to Leinster, they'll probably say no. Or Jalibert and Sam Prendergast, they'll probably say no, ‘we don't want Sam Prendergast, we're happy with Jalibert’.

"So that's why I say it's such a great competition with the best players playing against each other. I don't think anybody can be confident before the first game that, listen, ‘we're going to go all the way’.” 

The first step is the only step in the here and now. It’s a pretty intoxicating one. Clermont Auvergne haven’t troubled the summits of the Top 14 or Champions Cup for some time but Stade Marcel Michelin remains a cathedral of European rugby.

“I've never been there, and that's one ground that whenever I speak to… Say when I spoke to Daan Human, who played for Toulouse and had seven or eight years in the French league, it's always Clermont in Clermont: tough.

“Pieter de Villiers that played for France [said the same]. It always pops up somewhere that it's a nice place to go to and get tested and it's tough. When you coach, you always would love to coach a game at Eden Park, or you would love to be at the Aviva or Croke Park.

“So that's one of those. I'm looking forward to it.”

Leinster go there with little or nothing in the way of new injury worries on the back of their first win of the URC last weekend, against Cardiff at the Laya Arena, and with Jamison Gibson-Park back training with the squad for a second straight week.

He is in the frame for consideration this week, although the following week’s game with Munster at the Aviva Stadium may well be a more doable return-to-play target for the veteran scrum-half who has been troubled by a minor groin problem.

Joey Carbery, yet to play for Leinster since his return to the club from Champions Cup holders Bordeaux-Begles during the summer because of a knee injury, is another being assessed as the week goes on.