Healy meets challenges head on

IN this War of Attrition, it was The Battle of the Breakdown that ultimately proved decisive, a battle just shaded by the Leinster pack.

Fitting then that the first Leinster player to mount the rostrum in Murrayfield to receive his Heineken Cup medal was big Malcolm O’Kelly, Leinster’s oldest and longest-serving player having played a full part, all 80 minutes, in finally realising a great ambition.

Immediately following him, in a gesture as fitting and symbolic, was Leinster’s youngest – prop forward Cian Healy. While O’Kelly isn’t finished playing quite yet (he has another year on his contract) and Healy isn’t quite the finished article just yet, there is a sense of baton being passed, from folk hero established to folk hero in the flowering.