Scrum battle key as Jackman prepares for bruising return

BERNARD JACKMAN has been looking forward to tonight’s game all week and, despite all the evidence to the contrary in the RDS last Saturday, it would seem Castres have been too.

With just minutes to play in last week’s 30-3 romp, Jackman crouched down for a scrum and one sentence stood out from amid the usual clatter. The words were clear, the sentiment unmistakable. “See you next week, see you next week,” said the voice from the far trench.

Castres are out of Europe, stuck in the Top 14 relegation zone. They can’t be far away from holding open auditions for players, such has been their injury problems, but they are French and they are at home.

Those two simple facts alone demand Leinster’s attention and the importance of the first scrum can’t be overstated. Jackman admits it will be the first area Castres target.

Jackman knows too the effect a dominant scrum can have on a French crowd: “Particularly with a team that’s struggling. If you’re down at the bottom of the league, it’s very hard to get momentum. If you’re not playing well, it’s very hard to get a backline to spark. Whereas, immediately, they can put a lot of focus on the scrum.

“They’ve obviously got massive guys already, and quality technique. A lot of it is aggression and a lot of unity. They can kick-start something from there. It wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that they’re going to target us from there.”

Jackman has earned battle ribbons in these parts before, both with Leinster and Connacht, and has had some hairy moments. A crazy night in Toulon, where he was the victim of a nasty gouging incident, stands out above all the others.

Times have changed, he says, for the better. “It’s cleaned up a lot, thankfully. They usually had a few hatchet men that they’d put out for games like that. All they tried to do was just be a thug.

“That’s gone out of it now, they’re pretty much as physical as they always were, but the guys who wanted to fight are gone out of the game. There’s usually a lot of foreigners in their packs now, generally just big men, heavy.”

The imported blood hasn’t diluted the nature of the challenge. Games like these, Jackman points out, are why he plays rugby. France may be different, unfamiliar, but different is good in his book.

HE DOESN’T disparage the Magners League but it is a circuit he knows well by now and one which rarely offers something new. Europe, and France in particular, offers new players with new tricks, techniques and habits.

His hunger for the big European games is understandable given the fact that he spent the guts of eight years appearing in the ERC’s version of soccer’s UEFA Cup, the European Challenge Cup, during two spells with Connacht and one with Sale Sharks.

“If you play Parker Pen (Challenge Cup) five or six years and then get to the Heineken Cup, there’s no point in getting your opportunity and then not playing well. I enjoy playing it, it’s a marquee competition. You know you’re on Sky Sports, most of Europe is watching. You have to take those opportunities.”

No-one can say he didn’t stand out in last week’s 30-point win. Scoring the first of his side’s three tries saw to that, as did a clash soon after kick-off which left his bald pate requiring emergency medical attention.

“I got a few staples, which meant I came back on quickly enough. I couldn’t wear the scrum-cap so I threw it off. Then I put on a bandage but it was (flapping) like a Bobby Charlton combover.

“I couldn’t wait for the match to end. Every ruck one of them was going ‘your head, your head’.

As if I could do anything about it. It was at least covering the part that was bleeding, which was the main thing.”

He lines out again tonight in the belief that the entire Leinster pack have some questions to answer because, despite the lack of fight in Castres’s pack last week, they still did enough to hamstring Leinster’s ambitions.

It was the Irish side’s backs who shipped the majority of the blame for the failure to pick up the bonus point six days ago but Jackman redirected the blame towards the pack who, he says, failed to deliver enough quick ball.

“We let them mess around with our ruck ball by not being aggressive enough, clinical enough and blowing past. The amount of times Chris Whitaker had to root for the ball … once you have to do that, they’ve time to set, the next phase becomes slow and it just carries on from there. S

“So, we have to be more aggressive and ruthless.”

Isn’t it always thus in France?