Shell-shocked Contepomi bemoans lack of consistency

FIVE-THIRTY yesterday evening in the bowels of the West Stand and, despite the best efforts of her doting mum Paula, two-month old Catalina Contepomi is bawling her eyes out.

Her dad Felipe stands a couple of metres away, delaying the trip home to Milltown for a few minutes as he tries to find the words to explain both his and his team’s performance.

“How do you feel after that Felipe?” comes the first query.

“Like her,” he laughs, nodding towards his noisy offspring and giving the kind of Latin shrug that says: ‘c’est la vie’.

As the Leinster fans poured out onto the streets of Ballsbridge at full-time, the subject on most of their lips was the out-half’s missed shots on goal and general difficulties with the boot. His kicking game wasn’t the problem though, the medical student counters, just a symptom.

“It’s tricky here in Lansdowne. The wind. It’s not an excuse. I wasn’t that worried about the kicking. I was more worried about the running. You can win games because of kicks but we didn’t lose today because of them. Munster were better all over the place.

“It was just one of those days, but if you want to blame me you can blame me.”

Their critics will say “typical Leinster”, of course, wilting when the spotlight is turned on them. The opposite side to that coin is that they weren’t allowed play. Contepomi agrees, but his reasoning for Leinster’s disappointment yesterday digs a good bit deeper.

“Eight months we have been with this coach and it is a quite ambitious game we play. The good teams that play really good rugby like Toulouse, like Biarritz, they have coaches there a long time and have been developing their play for years.

“If there is one thing positive this year it is that - that we didn’t give up. I remember in October losing to Bath and people saying ‘now they will never make it out of the pools’ but then we got to the semi-final, beating Toulouse in Toulouse, beating Bath in Bath, playing some of the best rugby of the competition.”

But Leinster’s year will be coloured completely by yesterday. Much of the momentum built up with superb wins in Bath, Toulouse and the RDS against Munster has been lost.

A Celtic League title is still very much within their grasp, but Michael Cheika and David Knox have serious homework to do before their next assault on Europe can begin.

“The one thing we have been lacking this year was consistency,” says Contepomi. “We have proved that we can play some good rugby but you have to play it week in, week out.”

The other ingredient they may have lacked yesterday was experience, of the business end of the Heineken Cup in particular. For Munster, on the other hand, European semi-finals are becoming as routine as eating breakfast.

“It could be experience,” said Contepomi, “But we have some good players with experience of playing in games like that, lots of international players. It’s much more difficult to develop an ambitious game plan on days like this. It is much easier to disrupt the opposition so that’s why we couldn’t (play our game) from the start.”

Those destructive qualities may bring Munster the title, Contepomi says.

“They are capable of it. It all depends if they can take the ball out of Biarritz and Munster have a great lineout and scrum. Biarritz are not playing great either. Remember, this is their first final. Munster have been there twice and lost, so they might win the third one.”