James Ryan: 'What’s the alternative to pressure? You don’t want to go after it?'

PRESSURISED ENVIRONMENT: Leinster’s James Ryan. Pic: Andrew Conan/Inpho

If the opening weekend of the Champions Cup told us anything it was that our suspicions had merit before kick-off. 

The competition will again lack the frisson of the old days until it hits the later knockout stages, and Toulouse and Leinster are again ominously placed to be celebrating in Cardiff come the end.

This is top-end sport in the modern era: a stage awash with ever more games and expertise but one that is, paradoxically, producing a shrinking pool of heavyweights likely to be left standing when the season is wrapped and the silverware handed out. 

That puts an entirely different spin on games like Leinster’s against Clermont Auvergne this Saturday.

This was once one of the great European club rivalries.

Think back to the quarter-final at the RDS in 2010 when Brock James missed a string of sitters with the boot and Leinster edged through. 

Or the epic semi-final in Bordeaux a year later when Joe Schmidt’s team withstood a ferocious siege on their own goal-line and Wesley Fofana had a late try ruled out.

“I don’t think they’re too fond of us,” James Ryan chuckled this week.

As challenges go, it will be chalk and cheese to the ‘jouez jouez’ style adopted by the Pat Lam Bristol side that Leinster overcame in some style in the second-half at Ashton Gate last Sunday after a problematic first 40 minutes. Ryan has no doubt about what to expect in terms of style from the Top 14 team.

“To be more pragmatic. I don’t think they’ll play as much inside their own half. They’ll kick long from the off and try to put us under pressure so a different kind of challenge. Up front, they’ll be strong in terms of the weight they have in the pack so the setpiece will be important too.” 

Clermont have shown signs of a resurgence after a dip in recent years. They sit third in the Top 14 table after eleven rounds but their only win on the road was their last, against lowly Lyon. Their other four away dates have produced losses ranging in severity from 13 to 34 points. 

That does not bode well for the Aviva.

Les Jaunards might have nilled Benetton in the opening round of the Champions Cup first time out, and maybe the visitors will pick a strong team for Dublin and make life horrible for Leinster, but we have been burned too many times by these occasions in recent years to lean closer to expectation than hope.

For Leinster, everything they do in these pool stages is prefaced by the utter expectation that they will sail through, most likely with home advantage baked in through to the semi-finals. That brings its own pressures for a side that has lost three straight finals and four of the last six deciders.

“Someone asked me is there extra pressure. I don’t think there is,” said Ryan. “There’s always pressure and it’s probably pressure we put on ourselves in terms of expectations and standards. It’s the same this year.

“We want to go after winning trophies and that comes with huge pressure, but what’s the alternative? You don’t want to go after it? It’s the same this year, early days, but it’s great to be back in a competition we love playing in.” 

Toulouse’s demolition job on Ulster last week served warning of their intention to add a seventh title to their record haul. Bordeaux-Begles and La Rochelle will have their own say in events further down the line as well, but it’s hard not to think that Leinster are approaching the 'now or never' stage of this generation’s journey.

Eight of their front-line Ireland internationals will be in their 30s by the time the next final comes around and the additions of Rabah Slimani, Jordie Barrett (on a short-term contract) and RG Snyman have fuelled the idea of a collective built for the here and now.

The very calibre of those names harks back to the province’s most successful era when the foreign players drafted in were sourced from the top shelf and the club claimed its first three Heineken Cups. It may be that their influence off the field can help with it.

Barrett slotted in seamlessly to a rejigged Leinster backline in Bristol at half-time and, while Snyman’s abilities and athletic properties are blindingly obvious, Ryan couldn’t help but he tickled at how the South African laughed when Andrew the Bear’s Max Lahiff were both sin-binned at the same time after a scrum last Sunday.

Maybe a touch of levity is a good thing.

“It is. Now, I wouldn’t pat myself on the back for losing the finals but even having a bit of a smile… I’d be quite serious, certainly when I’m on the pitch, so when I see that I’m like … not being afraid to enjoy it as well. It is a good thing because maybe sometimes it can be a bit serious.”