Montpellier controversy could yet prove making of Leinster's campaign
Heineken Champions Cup Quarter-Final, Mattioli Woods Welford Road, Leicester, England 7/5/2022
Take a panoramic look at next week’s Heineken Champions Cup semi-final between Leinster and Toulouse and it's hard not to think that this is shaping up to be the Irish province’s year.
Not least because the stars looked to be aligned against them.
It was the EPCR’s decision to call off their trip to Montpellier and award the Top 14 side all five match points in December that consigned them to Saturday’s business in the East Midlands. Damaging at the time, it could well be the making of them.
That and the decision to leave the majority of their front-line Ireland internationals at home for the two weeks recently when Leo Cullen took a shadow squad to South Africa for the URC games against the Sharks and Stormers.
Look at all that now from the perspective of this nine-point win at a raucous Welford Road, where the wind blew and the Tigers bared their teeth in a sometimes sticky second half, and Leinster couldn’t ask for a better launchpad for the next assignment.
“If we’d lost this game everyone would have been saying they should have played a game the last two weeks but where would we play that game?” asked Cullen. “It would have been impossible in terms of the trip to South Africa.
“I was in South Africa so I knew what it was like coming back in Monday morning. It’s not easy turn that around. The English and French teams will have to face that in the future in Europe as well if they get drawn against them.
“It’s just a totally different dynamic so, yeah, there was risk in what we had done but we are through to the next round now and the guys will hopefully be better for the game even if that doesn’t guarantee anything.”
No, it doesn’t but the odds are certainly stacking in their favour.
Better to get Toulouse at the Aviva than Marseille, for example. It’s only three seasons since Leinster played host to the Top 14 bluebloods twice in the one season and sent them away again on the pair of what were two comfortable wins.
There is a sense with Toulouse that they are not quite at the pitch which earned them the league and European double last term. Munster and Ulster will both harbour regrets and ‘what ifs’ when they watch the French side play in Dublin this weekend.
Their next hosts have spent the bones of this season talking about their regrets from recent European campaigns. The desire to claim a fifth title, and a first since Bilbao in 2018, is an unquantifiable motivation that is underpinning everything they do.
“Toulouse is an unbelievably exciting challenge. They won the Top 14, won Europe, five-time champions and a lot of their players won the Grand Slam. It’s all there, isn’t it? But that’s what you want. You want to play the best and this is probably it.
“Big club, all the resources,” said Cullen, mining what is a familiar theme for him. “I remember us having this conversation seven or eight years ago: do we have a chance against them at all? Let’s see. We’ll do everything we can. We’ve done that the last number of years.”
None of that is to overlook the magnitude of the task that will await at the Stade Velodrome should they win again next time out. Not with the calibre of teams still involved on the far side of the draw and the memory of last year’s semi-final loss to La Rochelle so raw.
All that is for another day but what Saturday’s quarter-final demonstrated is that the Leicester Tigers, top of the Premiership having rediscovered their roots and their mojo, are far from ready to mix it with the likes of Leinster, Toulouse or La Rochelle.
Steve Borthwick’s side enjoyed 57% possession and an off-the-charts 72% territory but trailed their opponents 17-0 shortly after the first quarter was done and found the blue ball too strong and too stubborn for too long as they raged against the dying of the light.
Just five first-half minutes separated the tries for Josh van der Flier and Robbie Henshaw. It was a one-two reminiscent of the way in which they rattled Connacht in the Sportsground last month and it all but ended this tie as a contest.
Credit to Leicester who bookended that second-half fightback with scores from Chris Ashton and Nic Dolly but this was a meeting of one side that is years into a project and close to its culmination and another with only five players who had played in the last eight before.
“Leinster were clinical,” said Borthwick. “Really, really clinical.”
F Steward; C Ashton, M Moroni, G Porter, H Potter; G Ford, B Youngs; E Genge, J Montoya, D Cole; O Chessum, C Green; H Liebenberg, T Reffell, J Wiese.
N Nadolo for Moroni (45); G Martin for Reffell (50); J Heyes for Cole and R Wigglesworth for Youngs (both 59); H Wells for Green (63); F Burns for Ashton (67); N Dolly for Montoya (74); J Whitcombe for Genge (78).
H Keenan; J O’Brien, G Ringrose, R Henshaw, J Lowe; J Sexton, J Gibson-Park; A Porter, R Kelleher, T Furlong; R Molony, J Ryan; C Doris, J van der Flier, K Conan.
D Sheehan for Kelleher (48); M Ala’alatoa for Furlong, C Healy for Porter and R Byrne for Sexton (all 63); R Ruddock for Conan and L McGrath for Gibson-Park (both 71); T O’Brien for J O’Brien (72); J McCarthy for Ryan (77).
M Raynal (France).
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