Kearney: Reds will use Ireland grievances
Just two points separate the provincial rivals as they meet up at the Aviva Stadium, with both having lost just three times in the league and both having secured spots in the quarter-finals of the Heineken Cup the weekend after next.
Yet, 17 Leinster players saw action in the recent Six Nations under Joe Schmidt, while only four from Munster wore the green in the course of the five games. At one point, Racing Metro and Munster had the same representation on the field: one.
Suggestions of bias by Schmidt, the former Leinster coach, have understandably been batted away by the Kiwi yet his compatriot Rob Penney has been eager to stoke up the fires with talk of a game against the “Six Nations champions”.
Penney has a greater latitude to shoot from the lip, given he is departing Irish soil shortly, but Jono Gibbes, the Leinster forwards coach destined for Clermont Auvergne next season, was clearly queasy when the point was put to him yesterday.
Kearney was far more up front about whether Munster would hold a grudge.
“You probably would,” he admitted. “It is in the nature of being a competitor. If you don’t use something like that to fire you up and use it to your advantage, there is something a little bit wrong with you.
“I have no doubt they will use that. There’s no doubt that we’ve things to prove as well, you know, that there was such a strong Leinster contingent there. We have to show why. It is a double-edged sword.”
Kearney may have been the more open but it was difficult not to accept much of what the more reticent Gibbes said, too. For him, the memories of their previous meeting, the last being Leinster’s 19-15 defeat at Thomond Park last October, do most of the talking.
“Every time we played them, they were trying to kick us,” he said, (metaphorically it must be assumed), of the rivalry. “Look, I really don’t know if I really believe all that stuff, to be honest. Rob Penney is stirring it a little bit.
“Look at what they have done this year: they have got a home quarter-final, they’ve only lost three games, they’re off the top of the league by two points. I don’t know if they need all the peripheral stuff talked about by us.
“They’ve got a plan, they’ll be pretty confident coming here so, look, we just need to focus on being at the right level, because in round five we weren’t, and they were pretty comfortable going over the top of us.”
Leinster are amazingly light on injury worries given that duty roster for club and country over the last two months, although there was little indication as to whether Sean Cronin and Jack McGrath will have shaken off minor injuries by the weekend.
For Leinster, the focus this week is how best to re-assimilate their considerable international contingent in a coherent fashion that gives them the best chance of beating Munster this week as well as Toulon the next.
No easy feat.
As Kearney pointed out, there is huge depth in the back three and back row positions in particular, and the fact is that some Test-hardened players will have to sit out provincial games this next fortnight. “We’ve gotta make sure that we get the mix right and make sure we back a little bit the guys who kept us going through the Six Nations,” said Gibbes. “Reward them and integrate the international guys as well.”
Leinster will hope that they can replicate the script written when they last welcomed their Test men back from action in the November window, when they bettered the Scarlets and hammered Northampton at Franklin’s Gardens. That performance in England remains their best display of the season, by some margin, but the talk yesterday was of remembering calls and other jargon which Munster will no doubt dismiss as Leinster’s own version of mind games.
“We’ve got an awful lot of work to do and we don’t have a lot of time, so time we spend on the field is going to be really important,” said Kearney.
“We have to make sure every minute counts because it’s going to count over the next two (weekends).”
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