No excuses, no what ifs for Ronan O'Gara after Leinster 'hammer' La Rochelle

Dan Sheehan of Leinster shakes hands with La Rochelle head coach Ronan O'Gara after the Investec Champions Cup quarter-final at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin. Picture: Harry Murphy/Sportsfile

Ronan O’Gara called it as it was. A hammering. There were no excuses, no what ifs, just statements of fact. His La Rochelle side fell 27-points short of Leinster at the Aviva in a Champions Cup quarter-final. It’s hard to quibble with that.

“It’s easier to move on,” he said of that scoreline on Saturday night. 

“If it’s a close one, you always have a lot more regrets but if you have a small bit of cop on, you could see that the dominant team was in blue.

“They were sharper to everything and they made it difficult for us and their rush defence worked well and in the first 70. I don’t think we won a breakdown penalty bar the kick-off that we took.” 

O’Gara could have made something of their road here. Or, to be more precise, the air corridors. The reigning back-to-back champions have been almost two months on the road since leaving their home town for South Africa and the round of 16 tie with the Stormers.

They cut 12 hours from the return journey by ignoring La Rochelle and detouring instead to Cork via Paris and the director of rugby and his players and staff clearly benefited from the change of scenery in O’Gara’s home town.

So, he wasn’t about to lean on logistics now.

“That would be using an excuse. Maybe with hindsight it may have been a factor, but the better team won. The better team won. And that’s what sport is about.

“I have been lucky enough to be here as a victorious coach, so when it doesn’t work for you, you can’t blame the ref, you can’t blame your own players. Sometimes you just have to go, ‘well done to Leinster, they had a good plan, they executed it well and they kept us at arm’s length quite comfortably throughout the 80 minutes’.” Logic dictates that this backdrop can’t be ignored though.

La Rochelle have been up and down all season but they were unable to stitch together a concerted attacking stretch for over 30 minutes of this fifth instalment in what has become the tournament’s headline act.

O’Gara did admit at another point that “the boys are shattered inside in the changing-room”. The challenge for him and them now is to find a gear that was beyond them here in time for their next Top 14 game, against Castres, next Saturday afternoon.

The top 14 waits for no-one. A “monster”, O’Gara called it.

The club has never won a Bouclier de Brennus so the first job for the coaching staff is to make sure that the appetite is there to go at it again now. Flushing this 27-point loss and the end of their three-in-a-row ambitions from the systems will be a major part of that.

There were claims made for both sides’ prospects before kick-off in Ballsbridge. Both were missing key players. Neither had really convinced with their rugby so far this season but surely the Munster legend was taken aback by the eventual margin.

“No, I said before the game in an interview that I think we could put a score on these or else we could take a score because that’s the fascinating thing about coaching my boys.

“They are a special bunch and they are capable of playing incredible rugby, but today, we didn’t hit our stride.

“There are probably a number of reasons for that but 40-13 sounds like a hammering, and it is a hammering. At the same time, it’s only three tries against a Leinster team where you look how many opportunities we butchered as consolation scores - not as real scores, consolation scores - towards the end.

“I think, when it was in the ten-point zone, the game was always in doubt, but once it passed that, it’s too far-fetched to think you are going to be winning the game against a quality outfit.”