Leinster trip marks first test of Ronan O'Gara and La Rochelle's renewed resolve

Ronan O'Gara described La Rochelle's heavy defeat to Toulouse as a line in the sand for his side but what does that mean in reality?

Sat, 10 Jan, 2026 - 06:15

Brendan O'Brien

It doesn’t snow a lot in La Rochelle. This week it did. A video of a snowball fight between local police and residents went viral across France and Jack Nowell made sure to get out in it with his kids when time allowed.

Ronan O’Gara didn’t seem so enamoured with it all, but the La Rochelle head coach wasn’t making a lot of it either when asked if the downfall had hampered preparations ahead of their Champions Cup trip to Dublin where they face Leinster.

There is no room for excuses in his lexicon right now, in French or in English.

It’s two weeks since his side leaked nine tries and 60 points away to Toulouse. It was, he said at the time, the biggest defeat of his career. He described it as a “line in the sand” in his column in this paper on Friday.

It’s the kind of phrase used around the world in all manner of team sports, but what does it translate into on a daily basis? How does a coach, a squad and a club weaponise an experience like that going forward?

“Essentially, in a nutshell, train better, train more accurately, train with more bite, frame more competition, try to create competitors Monday to Friday so it becomes natural for a Saturday,” said O’Gara ahead of the flight to Ireland.

“So it's very much in its infancy, but it's interesting as a coach sitting in the stadium when you’re the away coach and you feel literally helpless. You feel that you've been taken out to sea.

“So after that, if you were being honest, if you want to achieve something this season, you have to change the pattern of training, the pattern of behaviours, the pattern of performance radically.

“Because they were just very at ease with the ball. We looked robotic and structured and I firmly believe that rugby when it's played best, you have a framework, but within that you give license to your players to do whatever they want.”

Nowell was one of a string of frontline players who didn’t feature against Toulouse but no-one was exempt from what fallout of what the ex-England international admitted was an “embarrassing” experience when the defeat was addressed at training.

“When we looked back to the game on Monday and the review after, we were doing things that wasn't asked,” said Nowell. “We looked like we didn't really know what we were doing out there. We didn't really look like we knew how to play rugby.”

Putting ten tries on a painfully young and inexperienced Toulon side in the course of a 66-0 home win last week isn’t exactly being paraded as proof that a side very much in the midst of a rebuild has suddenly reached some higher plane.

O’Gara and Nowell admitted as much with the latter pointing out that the Toulouse low had come directly after their impressive win against Bayonne earlier in December and one that had everyone feeling pretty confident about themselves.

If Toulon were there for the taking then Nowell’s thoughts on the game are still worth contemplating. It wasn’t that they won, he explained, more the manner in how they stuck to their guns and their structures long after the result was decided. It was their intent.

Taking that on the road will be trickier against their old friends from Leinster.

La Rochelle have lost six of their seven ties away from the fortress that is Stade Marcel Deflandre this season, although their only success was a brilliant effort against a Lyon team who had claimed 14 of 15 points on home soil up to that point in October.

Leinster, while failing to find their rhythm for most of the season, have won seven on the spin since losing to Munster in Croke Park that same month. O’Gara knows what awaits as they meet for a seventh time in five years.

“Usually they're an unbelievably well-oiled machine. You can see at the minute they've lost games and they're a little bit clunky, but they've got absolute thoroughbreds right throughout their 15, three, four positions deep.

“It's a coach's dream, in that regard, who you pick from week to week. So we expect them to be at their best and when they're at their best they're obviously very, very good, but when we're at our best, we're very, very good as well.”