Cheika wants to break cycle

MICHAEL CHEIKA has tasted victory as often as he has defeat against Munster but the Australian now wants his side to establish clear bragging rights in one of world rugby’s most passionate rivalries.

The Irish provinces have met 10 times since Cheika’s arrival from Sydney with the record showing five wins apiece, four each in the Magners League and one apiece in their Heineken Cup meetings.

“The two matches — and hopefully three again this year — they’re the highlights of your season. For me, as a foreigner who’s come here and grown to understand the rivalry, it’s a real classic. You don’t find this type of rivalry in many other places.

“What we have to do is break the tit-for-tat nature of this encounter — you know, we win, then they win, or they win two and we win two. If we want to be successful on Saturday, we need to break that cycle.

“It always seems to be the team who’s mentally angrier, who wants to come back to win that match. We gotta break that cycle by being mentally angrier this weekend, even though we won that last time, because last time means nothing.”

Brian O’Driscoll, the last of Leinster’s mothballed stars, has been called into the squad for the first time this season and will definitely start although the game has come a week too early for South African prop CJ van der Linde.

Both have participated in full contact training sessions but van der Linde was omitted from the panel on a borderline decision because of the length of his layoff and the fact that the front row has been performing so well.

It has been a difficult juggling act for Cheika — and Tony McGahan — with players returning to duty at varying points in the nascent season and the Leinster coach is intrigued as to what composition his opposite number will field at the RDS.

“A lot of their younger guys have played really well. Felix Jones has played really well. Niall Ronan’s not that young, but he’s played out of his skin. Toby Morland has played really well. So there’s some very interesting selections for us to wait for.”

Munster are the only one of the other three provinces to have beaten Leinster in Dublin while Cheika has been in situ and the additions of a fit Nick Williams and Jean De Villiers into the mix has only increased the chances of another successful raid on Ballsbridge.

“Yeah, they’ve got a pretty powerful centre pairing and then you think (Keith) Earls will probably have to play 15. There’s a lot of power and pace there. Then you’ve got (Doug) Howlett. That’s why they’re such good matches.

“You’ve got lots of good players and they’re hungry. We’ve just got to make sure we’re hungrier than they are on Saturday.”

The rivalry has evolved over the years and not just in terms of its magnitude. Leinster used to be tagged as the Fancy Dans, Munster as the hard-nosed grunts but those arbitrary lines have been blurred in recent seasons. Leinster had to grind their way through vast swathes of last season and have already done so again this time around with drop goals, penalties and tackles made far more apparent in the first four rounds than tries or flowing back line moves. Munster, for their part, began to develop a more expansive style under McGahan last year. With De Villiers on board, that policy will hardly be abandoned and Cheika sees the funny side when the suggestion of a personality swap between the provinces is put to him.

“God, that’d be the end of me. My Randwick roots would be finished. The drop goals aren’t my intent, I promise. I just think we’re probably more desperate to win than we’ve ever been before. We’ll do whatever it takes to do that.

“If it doesn’t work one way we’ll do it another way. It’s like, if you lose the ball in the lineout, you can’t go and cry about it, you’ve got to go and get it some other way. Go there and get it off them or force them to kick it back to you.

“I’d like to think that attitude is in our team and that we’re really wanting to play like that every week. So far that’s been good for us in a couple of games but this week’s another match — a match of monumental proportions for us in context of the rivalry, in the context of the league and in the lead up to the European cup next week.”

Leinster squad (v Munster): Forwards: L Cullen, J Fogarty, C Healy, J Heaslip, N Hines, B Jackman, S Jennings, S Keogh, R McCormack, K McLaughlin, S O’Brien, M O’Kelly, M Ross, D Toner, S Wright.

Backs: S Berne, G D’Arcy, G Dempsey, L Fitzgerald, S Horgan, C Keane, R Kearney, Simon Keogh, F McFadden, I Nacewa, B O’Driscoll, E Reddan, J Sexton.