La Rochelle and O'Gara have done the Champions Cup some service

It’s not that they won’t be back at this sharp end of the tournament - everything suggests they absolutely will be – but it's only right that the end of this particular era be given due recognition.

SALUTE: Dan Sheehan leads the Leinster players through the La Rochelle show of respect at the Aviva Stadium. Pic: Harry Murphy/Sportsfile

Half-time in the Newlands Stadium in Cape Town nine days ago and Ronan O’Gara couldn’t help but feel that this was a pretty crap way for his La Rochelle team’s tilt at a Champions Cup three-in-a-row to come up short.

The visitors were 16-0 adrift of the Stormers. Their director of rugby wrote in these pages after the fact about how the first-half had been like playing rugby in a steam room or a sauna. His champions were lifeless, sluggish, playing without direction.

“It was like fellas had been hit by a stun gun,” he wrote in Friday's Irish Examiner. This wasn’t how anyone wanted it to end. With a whimper. What happened next was Hollywood. La Rochelle roused themselves after the break and, if it took a wayward Mannie Libbok conversion to seal the win, then they had earned that break.

O’Gara’s inner thoughts would have been less despondent during the interval on Saturday. Louis Penverne’s maul try before the break left them just ten points behind Leinster having had almost none of the ball. This wasn’t improbable anymore, it looked perfectly doable.

The sight of O’Gara throwing grass in the air before disappearing down the tunnel to talk to his troops spoke for the belief and plans being hatched, but that score proved to be the only blow they landed. The game was done with a half-hour to go.

The boss man made no qualifications after. Leinster had dominated and deserved the win. The word ‘hammering’ was uttered. There would be no repeat of Newlands, or of the Aviva last May when they reeled in a 17-point deficit against Leinster in the final.

This was the whimper that O’Gara had feared the week before but if he declined the chance to use their punishing travel schedule over the previous two weeks as a crutch for the blow then it has to be taken into any accurate accounting here and now.

“It's very hard. Very, very hard,” said Grégory Alldritt after dreams of emulating Toulon’s three-peat ended. “As you know, this European Cup was a very important objective for us. Going out in the quarters, and in this way, it was not what we imagined, what we wanted.” 

Their exit merits reflection. It’s not that they won’t be back as a force at this sharp end of the tournament - everything suggests they absolutely will be – but its only right that the end of this particular era be given due recognition.

La Rochelle had played just two campaigns in the Champions Cup before they emerged as this force. Two. Their maiden voyage reached the quarter-final stage in 2017/18. They lost four times and failed to escape the harbour that was the pool stages two years later.

From there they raised anchor and conquered whole new worlds.

A 2020/21 quarter-final emasculation of a Sale side that had put 57 points on Scarlets in West Wales the week before was their coming out party. Strangling Leinster in the last four confirmed their entry to the higher echelons of the club game.

Defeat by five points to Toulouse in the 2021 Twickenham final delayed the coronation but they accounted for three Top 14 rivals – Bordeaux-Begles, Montpellier and Racing 92 – before pipping Leinster in Marseille for their first ever major honour the following term.

Twelve months later and they franked that by doubling the dose for Leinster in Dublin but it shouldn’t be forgotten that they made it that far by taking care of Exeter Chiefs and Saracens, both recent winners of this same tournament.

The scenes at the Vieux Port as they celebrated both of those titles stand as some of the most remarkable witnessed in the near-30-year history of the tournament. It may be that only the crowds on Limerick’s O’Connell Street in 2006 come close.

Their embrace of the tournament can’t be taken for granted. Take Brive’s one-and-done win back in 1997 away and only three French clubs have won this tournament. It’s an appalling record that points an accusing finger at the Top 14.

La Rochelle came within an injury-time Romain Ntamack try of doing the double last May and they fell in the final to Toulouse two years before as well. They have proven that French clubs with the will and the way can flourish on two fronts.

For now their efforts will be siloed into the league.

Ten wins and as many losses has them sitting fifth in the Top 14 table with six rounds of the regular season to go and the road doesn’t get any easier as they lick these wounds and return home with Tawera Kerr-Barlow and Dillyn Leyds to add to the casualty list.

Next up after their grueling travels to South Africa and Ireland? A ten-hour round trip to the south of France next weekend where they play a Castres side with their own end-of-season playoff hopes very much alive.

The journey continues.