Jamie addicted to winning big games
Two defeats to the latter Top 14 outfit diverted the Irish province into the Amlin Challenge Cup which they won courtesy of a victory over Stade Francais at the RDS the evening before the big one in the Aviva.
Heaslip was a resident of Ringsend at the time, a short hop from the stadium and a favoured parking bay for the masses, and he joked yesterday about how he cursed the vehicles that piled up around his house.
It wasn’t the traffic itself so much as the fact it made it impossible for him to ignore the hoopla up the road despite the celebrations from the night before and the barbecue that he put together out in the garden.
“It did make me a little bit jealous,” he said.
There will be no avoiding Toulon this week. Nor was there yesterday when he was inevitably asked about his well-publicised flirtation with Mourad Boudjellal’s megabucks side earlier this year before recommitting to Leinster. He took some flak for it at the time. Sean O’Brien, too. In a dressing-room where little is sacred, Heaslip was the butt of copious jokes and wisecracks with more than a few delivered in a comedy French accent.
Yet he was coy about that part of his life yesterday. Even when asked what it is that attracts so many of the world’s top players to the Mediterranean port – aside from the ridiculous money, obviously.
“I don’t know,” he replied ahead of Sunday’s Heineken Cup quarter-final over there. “You’d have to ask them. A lot of them are guys who are from the southern hemisphere and they just want to come to Europe and play footie up here. Living in the south of France, there’s worse places I feel you can live, but you’d really have to ask them. They have got good players, it’s a good team, great fans. In ways it’s a lot like Leinster, to be honest, but it’s still not Leinster.”
He’s ready for this. He spoke positively of what it was like to win two trophies – the Amlin and the Pro12 – on home RDS turf last May but he also confessed to the “addictive” nature of playing and winning the biggest of the big games.
It was an addiction that kicked in eight years ago when, in his first season as a Leinster regular, Michael Cheika’s side stunned Toulouse and European rugby by claiming a 41-35 win at Le Stadium.
Heaslip’s abiding memory is of the flight home which, for some reason was on a two-story Boeing. He slept the entire way. The magnitude of what they achieved wouldn’t sink in until later. “I just thought it was normal, to be honest. That squad was a half-and-half squad, as in on that day there was guys who had been there for a while playing footie and then there was a good few of us for whom it was our first or maybe second season.
“Maybe [we were] going into the game a little bit naïve, a little bit innocent about it, and coming home thinking this was pretty standard going over to France and winning in Toulouse’s back garden in a sold-out game in the quarter-finals.”
That win erased a lot of the “fear” Leinster had previously experienced when on the continent but Heaslip also stressed the end to that tale which came with defeat to Munster at a Lansdowne Road dominated on and off the pitch by the Red Army.
“You felt both ends of the spectrum, kind of learned from it, and I just basically said: ‘I never want to experience that kind of game again.’ And so far, I think, that’s mostly rang true.”
The provinces may yet get to do it again at Lansdowne Road, of course. Should Leinster sack the Mayol and Munster account for Toulouse in Limerick they would set up another all-Ireland affair in Dublin 4.
“They’ve got a lot to worry about themselves this week,” he cautioned. “Just like us. So we’ll see where the cards lay afterwards.”
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