Lancaster plays down unbeaten season chances

For Leinster, history beckons — and it’s only mid-season.

Account for Lyon at the RDS this Sunday, and the province will have matched its best-ever unbeaten ‘start’ to a campaign. One more win and it will be 15 straight, equalling the streak set in the course of the 2001/02 campaign when the Celtic League was taking its first, tentative steps.

Times were very, very different back then.

Leinster’s home was the 7,500-capacity Donnybrook. Among the sides beaten in that spell were Llanelli, Ebbw Vale, Bridgend, and Pontypridd, as well as clubs whose names don’t now reek of nostalgia.

Toulouse were hit for 40 points, Glasgow were sent home packing, and Munster were undone in front of 30,000 at the old Lansdowne Road.

It was Toulouse who brought it all to an end, Leinster falling to a 43-7 defeat at the Stade Ernest Wallon in mid-January.

Another loss, away to Leicester in the quarters, would end their European hopes, but they did at least claim the league title after all their efforts.

Eighteen years on, and a double is well within their sights, but their unbeaten start to the season which, added to the semi-final and final PRO14 results last May, brings their current winning run to 16, has led to a growing swell of interest in each and every game they play.

Is it actually conceivable that they could go a full season without a loss?

“No, no,” said an almost horrified Stuart Lancaster. “It’s not something that any team would ever go and be that arrogant ... that you say we are going to go through the season unbeaten when you know the games that you have got to come around the corner.

“Two European games for a start, three PRO14 games, then we go into the quarter-finals, semi-finals, and finals of Europe and the PRO14.

There is no team that would ever sit there and go: ‘We want to go unbeaten’. What drives us, obviously, is to win every game — that’s for sure. I don’t think we should shy away from that, but we don’t talk about an unbeaten season.

No team has ever managed to traverse any of the three main European leagues without defeat, but Lancaster —ever the student of the game — couldn’t help but ask if it had ever been done in the southern hemisphere. It has. Twice.

A Blues side containing Sean Fitzpatrick, Zinzan Brooke, Carlos Spencer, and Brian Lima won 10 times and drew once in claiming the Super Rugby title in 1997. Then The Crusaders delivered the perfect season five years later , coming out on top in all 11 fixtures.

That was a side also boasted former Leinster and Ireland scrum coach Greg Feek, Richie McCaw, current Crusaders boss Scott Robertson, Justin Marshall, Andrew Mehrtens, and Aaron Mauger. Not bad, a bad crew but winning 11 games is one thing — Leinster would have to go unbeaten across 32.

“I’m not surprised it has never been done,” said Lancaster. “It is such a difficult thing to do. It’s not even something we talk about, to be honest.” Others are starting to do that for them. More and more and more will add to the chatter the longer this run goes on. Coaches and players like to dismiss such talk as distraction and noise. They speak predictably of life inside the ‘bubble’, but it can’t fail to have some effect.

Some of the Dublin players who claimed a historic fifth straight All-Ireland football title last September have since admitted that the buzz around their quest ramped up the pressure during the summer. Taking Leinster down is always a feather in the cap for opponents and all the more so now they are flying so high.

Odds are that it will happen sooner or later.

Lyon, all but mathematically out of the equation in Europe already, are expected to send a reserve side over to Dublin for this Sunday’s Heineken Champions Cup encounter, but the Cheetahs in Bloemfontein during the Six Nations and other PRO14 games where Leinster they have little to play for are obvious stumbling blocks in themselves.

Leinster lost three times in the latter half of the PRO14 season last year, and four in the campaign prior to that. Something will give, but could they struggle in their more immediate challenge this week — maintaining their lofty standards against a weakened opponent, when they have already booked their own places in the knockout rounds of Europe?

“Not at all,” said Lancaster.

Getting the home quarter-final is critical for a whole variety of reasons. Coming first or second seed is equally important, because then you get a home semi-final if you win your home quarter.

“We found to our cost a couple of years ago when we drew the final pool game against Castres. We end up in third place, had a home quarter-final and away semi-final against Clermont, and lost that. That sticks with everyone.”