Leinster: It’ll be no Paris pushover
With Leinster bidding for their 25th Heineken Cup win on the road, boosted by the availability of Gordon D’Arcy, Racing have kept a number of front-liners in reserve or out of the squad altogether with one eye clearly on their crucial Top 14 clash with Clermont Auvergne next week.
Racing may plead otherwise on the basis of making just three changes from the team beaten by Clermont in last week’s Heineken Cup pool clash, but it’s manifestly evident they’re holding back as many front-liners as possible for a repeat tie with their French rivals; the Paris-based side will hope to get at least a losing bonus point to maintain their challenge for domestic honours — they’re a close second to Toulouse at the top.
Injury has ruled out iconic forward Sebastian Chabal, while coach Pierre Berbizier has held French international Lionel Nallet, Italian Andrea Lo Cicero and South Africans Francois Steyn and Jacques Cronje for the bench. In fact, Berbizier’s entire first-choice front and back rows are given the night off and none of the back division which faced Toulon two weeks ago in the Top 14 will start against Leinster, although first-choice fly-half Juan Pablo Hernandez came off the bench that night and will start against the Joe Schmidt’s men.
How else can one interpret their selection?
Not that Leinster will buy into the theory circulating around the city’s arrondissements last night that Racing will willingly roll over this evening. Leinster forwards coach Jono Gibbes believes, in fact, that having much the same team lineout in consecutive weeks will be of benefit to the French side if anything.
With Leinster again minus the injured Jamie Heaslip, Gibbes believes it will be a tough encounter, possibly the toughest of the campaign.
“French teams just don’t like losing at home,” he warned.
Like Racing, Leinster’s starting line-up also shows three alterations, with D’Arcy replacing Fergus McFadden, Isaac Boss coming in for Eoin Reddan and Rhys Ruddock for Dominic Ryan. All those replaced are named in the reserves.
Said Gibbes: “I think, internally, the pressure’s never off,” he said, “like with the loose forward situation, whoever plays knows they have to gun hard and play for keeps because there’s a pressure there for selection. The Saracens result was positive but by no means perfect. The pressure’s on.”
Gibbes has spent the week warning his Leinster forward charges of what to expect and not to base that expectation on Racing’s capitulation in round one at the RDS in October (38-22).
“I can’t speak for the backs but I think they’ve got some set-piece power. Last time we played them, we came in with a couple of tactics to disrupt them and catch them on the hop. I felt the front row in particular applied itself really well. I’m sure they (Racing) are licking their wounds a bit from that and they’ll have a few scores to settle in the scrum so the scrum is going to be a key area and they’ve got brute strength with their lineout drive.
“As a team, we can’t afford to be ill-disciplined because they can kick into the corners and set up their lineout drives and obviously, it’s going to be a team focus to try and defend from there, total and utter focus.”
Leinster faced up to Racing’s physicality on opening day and Gibbes will be calling for more of the same, reasoning: “You’ve no choice. They’re so big, if you’re not 100% committed, they’ll roll straight over the top of you. We were successful with a few things we did against them at home because the boys were fully committed with their bodies and put it on the line. That’s a bare minimum against these guys. If you don’t deliver that as a baseline, it will be really tough.”
Brian O’Driscoll turns 32 today and can’t think of a much better way to celebrate than with another victory.
But he’s not fooled by Racing’s impossible position in the pool and the perceived lack of interest as they now focus more on the domestic Top 14.
“You can be sure they’re not going to roll over. There’s huge pride to be had, particularly for French sides, about not losing at home, whether it be in the Top 14 or in Europe. The side they named isn’t one that has been selected to lose the game. They’ll want to impress their home crowd, they’ll want to finish the competition on a high so we’re certainly not going to walk into a home quarter-final. We’ll have to fight for our victory and I anticipate a very hard game, as they always are in France, irrespective of the opposition.”
Although Leinster proved they have immense scoring power again when producing six tries in the win over Saracens, O’Driscoll was quick to highlight the downsides.
“It’s nice to score tries, but we won’t get carried away because we gave away three bad ones. (Last week), we probably made it harder for ourselves than we needed, I thought we were better than the scoreline might have indicated at half-time but that shows you can’t let teams into games, you have to have that ruthless streak.”
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