Cullen awaits Tiger onslaught
Every session was a battle, where the law of the jungle reigned and players routinely “kicked lumps out of each other”. Then there were the times when the forwards would be sentenced to 50 scrums, one after another after another. “Old school”, he called it.
Martin Johnson and Neil Back had hung up their boots by the time Cullen arrived in the summer of 2005 but soul-mates like Graham Rowntree, Julian White, Martin Corry, Ben Kay and Louis Deacon were still at Welford Road.
So too was Richard Cockerill who, after two playing stints spanning 10 years with the Premiership market leaders had just begun life as the club’s forwards coach and who is now the commander-in-chief.
If ever a coach embodied a club, it is Cockerill.
“He’s your classic pit bull,” said Cullen. “He was always irritating to play against and in his coaching style he’s pretty prone to mood swings. As a forwards coach it was very much dependent on what we were like at the weekend. He actually pays great attention to detail, spends a lot of time working with players individually on the smallest details from every game. He’s a good, tough, hard character.
Cockerill’s autobiography was titled ‘In Your Face’ and it sums up the attitude of a club that has won English and European honours on a platform of physical dominance, one the current crop will seek to emulate in a repeat of the 2009 Heineken Cup final tomorrow.
In that sense the challenge facing Joe Schmidt’s side will not be unlike the one Munster presented in Limerick in the Magners League derby last week and Cullen accepts the comparisons between the two heavyweights.
“It’s all about the contact areas. They target the contact areas. Playing against Munster you know you’re going to be in for a tough day in terms of contact. They compete for everything and are very aggressive when it comes to the ball on the ground. They try to keep you off the ground as much as possible as well and try to squeeze and choke the life out of you. Leicester are very similar in what they’re doing.”
A juggernaut was how he described Leicester at full pelt and, again, such a description could be easily assigned to Munster’s second-half performance in Thomond Park when they overturned an eleven-point half-time deficit to claim victory.
The manner of the defeat – with Ronan O’Gara kicking penalty after penalty — must have been as bitter for Leinster as the loss itself given the side’s marked superiority in that opening period and Cullen has made discipline priority number one this week.
“We were questioning some of the decisions at the time but you’ve got to play the referee and the officials at the end of the day. We lacked the intensity when we ran out for the second-half that we had in the first-half.”
Leinster will nonetheless start as favourites on home turf tomorrow and with good reason according to Cockerill, who claimed this week that Premiership clubs are fighting with one hand tied behind their back by the Premiership’s salary cap.
The Leicester coach suggested victory over Leinster in Dublin would rank alongside the club’s nine league titles and back-to-back Heineken Cup successes while injured Irish full-back Geordan Murphy has noted that English sides risked becoming the poor man of European rugby if the financial regulations were not changed.
Joe Schmidt clearly doesn’t agree.
“We’re in a pretty similar situation to Leicester,” said the Leinster coach. “You only have to look at their team. I don’t think they’re too disadvantaged by their salary cap. I know it exists and they’ve got to work within it but, gee, they certainly run out with some pretty good names.”
Schmidt strengthened his case with a roll call of talent including Martin Castrogiovanni, the Tuilagi brothers, Ben Youngs and Toby Flood and claimed that Leicester would actually be the envy of a number of teams in France where there is no such cap.
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