Leinster's lean on youth against La Rochelle could be a road map for Ireland

There are clear signs of green shoots in Ulster, Munster and Connacht and yet Leinster may again be in the process of producing the richest of harvests.

Joshua Kenny of Leinster evades the tackle of Sam Gilbert of Connacht. Pic: Seb Daly/Sportsfile

Paddy McCarthy starting at loosehead. Thomas Clarkson packing down on the far side of the front row. 

Joshua Kenny given the nod on the left wing. A bench containing Jerry Cahir, Andrew Sparrow, Diarmuid Mangan and Andrew Osborne. 

Calls you might expect for a routine URC game rather than a heavyweight Champions Cup clash.

Pretty much all of those selections have been moulded in one form or another by injuries to more established men, but Leinster’s need to trust in so much youth and relative inexperience for their Champions Cup pool tie against La Rochelle will shine a light into the near future and what it might mean for the province, and for Ireland.

There are clear signs of green shoots when it comes to the next generation of players in Ulster, Munster and Connacht and yet Leinster, stock providers to Andy Farrell and Joe Schmidt before him, may again be in the process of producing the richest of harvests from the four green fields.

McCarthy has already played four times for his country, Clarkson ten, while Kenny has positively exploded into the consciousness out wide having claimed four tries in his five Leinster games to date and impressed equally in other ways.

A neck injury to James Lowe opens up this window of opportunity.

“He’s been a revelation really,” said head coach Leo Cullen. “I think if you watch his ball carry specifically his change-up into contact, he really explodes through contact which makes him a proper handful and he fully deserves to get picked.” 

As McCarthy, his brother Joe and the likes of Sam Prendergast have shown, the step up from provincial to Test rugby can actually be made in jig time if a consistent enough body of work and high enough ceiling is seen as part of the package.

Kenny has the skillset to follow suit and what better way to catch the eye of the Ireland brains trust than in lining up opposite Jack Nowell in a Champions Cup game at a heaving Aviva Stadium and against a side that has, for now, overtaken Munster as Leinster’s biggest rivals?

Farrell names his Six Nations squad next Wednesday week, after the last round of pool games is done and dusted. Ulster will hope that their bump in fortunes this season will be rewarded with an extended representation but they play Challenge Cup rugby this next two weekends. 

That won’t help.

Connacht, another marooned in the limbo of Europe’s second-tier tournament, haven’t been pulling up trees and the sense when it comes to too many Munster hopefuls is that certain players need to produce a string of stunning performances to raise their stock.

The perception is that the gap between Ireland’s first-choice roster and its supporting cast is just not being bridged. It’s one fostered by repeated failures of fringe players to make a watertight case for promotion when offered chances against weaker opponents in November or in ‘A’ games.

All of which brings us back to Leinster who have already provided the lion’s share of new blood in the national squad since the last World Cup via guys like Paddy McCarthy, Clarkson, Tommy O’Brien and Sam Prendergast. 

They have eleven internationals on the sidelines here and still can’t find room for other up-and-comers like Charlie Tector and Brian Deeny.

Joey Carbery’s expected return next summer will stiffen competition for places.

McCarthy and Clarkson are being understudied off the bench by Jerry Cahir and Andrew Sparrow who have five caps between them. Cahir is 25 and was playing AIL for Lansdowne up until the end of last season. Sparrow, an academy tighthead, made his senior debut last October.

Andrew Porter misses out with a calf strain picked up late in the week and his absence does at least spare him another afternoon trying to stay on the right side of referee Andrew Brace who binned him in that infamous Irish loss to the Springboks in November when the home scrum was demolished.

Jack Boyle, Tadhg Furlong and Rabah Slimani complete the list of crocked front rows.

Leinster can still boast 14 Test players in their XV with another four on a bench that isn’t as fearsome as a result of the absentees. 

They face a La Rochelle side that is just about as close to its best as Ronan O’Gara can fashion with nine of his own left at home in the casualty wards.

Among the absentees are Paul Boudhent, Pierre Bourgarit, Jonathan Danty, Matthias Haddad and Thomas Lavault, but O’Gara still has a plethora of star power with Will Skelton and Ihaia West part of it having returned to fitness last week when hammering a baby-faced Toulon side at home.

“Obviously they've got a fair beating in their last away game against Toulouse, but I still think they will go back to type, which is around lineout drive in particular,” said Cullen. “That's where they will try to take us on again. Defensively they'd be very aggressive at the ball with some of the players that they have there: Botia, Jegou, Alldritt.

“So I'm just making sure that we deal with some of those threats that they have. The teams will know each other pretty well. So just making sure that for our guys, it's just being excited by the challenge of the opposition and the opportunity to play in a big game in front of friends, family and all the rest at this time years, fantastic.

“So don't let it pass us by is probably the big thing, isn't it? Really savour these days, because they’re great when you've got 40-odd thousand people turning up for a round three game of a European competition. It’s not a knockout game but it definitely has that type of feel.”