Canny Blues have turned tables before
It has become an accepted staple of the rugby vernacular, along with those about the French being ropey on the road, Brian O’Driscoll being a quick healer and Thomond Park being something of a fortress.
Like all clichés, it is one bedrocked in a block of truth and both Leinster and Munster are living, breathing proof as they seek to overcome a damaging pair of defeats apiece over a set of weekends that will make or break their seasons.
There was a time in the Heineken Cup, before the introduction of four points for a win and bonus points for narrow defeats and multiple tries, when two defeats was by no means the daunting obstacle that it is to overcome today. Year after year, sides would saunter relatively seamlessly on despite the baggage of two reversals, while Llanelli and Glasgow made the knockout stages despite losing three of their six games back in the dying embers of the last century.
Llanelli, Swansea, Monterrand and Pau. So many of their names, like the system employed at the time, belong to another era and so too does Munster’s miraculous defeat of Gloucester in 2003 which allowed them squeeze through on eight points.
Two points for a win? How quaint that sounds now.
Modernity was ushered in the following season and the landscape changed. Utterly.
Come January now, mathematics is almost as integral to a team’s preparations as sports science and diet.
In football’s Premier League, 40 points has become the magic number for sides hoping to avoid relegation. In the Heineken Cup, 20 has become the accepted minimum for those sides hoping to escape their pools. There is no hard or fast rule to it all but, as the accompanying panel demonstrates, progressing after two defeats has gone from being the norm to something of an exception.
Ospreys, however, must still wonder how they didn’t escape the group stages in 2007 with a 20-point haul after winning four games and drawing another.
The Celtic Warriors, Stade Francais and Leeds Tykes have all been barred from the VIP section despite racking up the same amount of points in the past but there have been less exacting bars set now and again too.
Leicester (in 2005) and Northampton (in 2010) both survived beyond January despite accumulating just 19 points but Leinster remain the only side to have bucked the odds after losing two of their first four encounters.
That was seven years ago when they lost their opener at home to Bath and had their pockets emptied by a last-minute kick in Bourgoin in round four, despite having racked up 50 points on the French side the week before in Dublin.
“I’m definitely not counting us out,” said coach Michael Cheika minutes after the whistle as the consequences of defeat were still dawning but Donal Lenihan spoke for most when he wrote in this paper that he couldn’t see Leinster making it out. As it happened, Leinster amassed 81 points the following month against Glasgow at home and away to Bath and, with results elsewhere falling into line, they progressed to that never-to-be-forgotten quarter-final win in Toulouse.
Four of those players — O’Driscoll, Gordon D’Arcy, Rob Kearney and Jamie Heaslip — remain key to Leinster’s hopes tomorrow. Something to draw on, perhaps, even if Kearney believes it would serve them better to ignore the wider picture for now.
“We understand the dynamics of the situation we’re in but, if you lose sight of the game and what’s immediately in front of you, your focus starts to drift a bit.”
They have done it once before. Time now for Mission Impossible II.
History will be witnessed today at the RDS, regardless of what happens.
Brian O’Driscoll has been on the bench for Leinster before but only four times — the last being this month four years ago against Connacht — and never for a Heineken Cup match.
O’Driscoll, whose only appearance as a replacement in 120 Ireland caps came against Romania in the 1999 Rugby World Cup, is being “managed” back to full fitness after his return from an ankle injury against Edinburgh last week.
Rob Kearney and Luke Fitzgerald, two others who reappeared after stints in casualty in that tie, start in what is probably Leinster’s most potent back line of an injury-ravaged season.
O’Driscoll aside, there are a few other eye-raising selections with injury depriving Joe Schmidt of Richardt Strauss’s services despite positive updates on the hooker earlier in the week.
Isaac Boss starts at scrum-half instead of Eoin Reddan who is perceived as the ‘home’ nine for European fare while Devin Toner partners Leo Cullen at lock instead of Damien Browne who did the honours in rounds three and four.
All told, it is a selection that should have enough about it to deal with a Scarlets side missing out-half Rhys Priestland and wing George North but a win is just the beginning here rather than the end.
Leinster require a four-try bonus point if qualification is to remain even an outside bet and they will have to cope better with Scarlets’ back row and the Welsh pack’s ability to scruff up the breakdown if they are to score those tries.
O’Driscoll aside, Leinster’s bench is light on game-changers on either side of the scrum but the sense is that a combination of desperation, fewer injuries and Scarlets’ lack of motivation may just allow them to do the necessary.
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