La Rochelle mugged but Cullen warns Bayonne visit won't be a steal
THAT'S MY BOY: La Rochelle head coach Ronan O'Gara shakes hands with Con Cullen, son of Leinster head coach Leo Cullen, right, during the Investec Champions Cup match between Leinster and La Rochelle at the Aviva Stadium in Dublin. Photo by David Fitzgerald/Sportsfile
Leinster have faced French opposition 75 times in the Heineken and Champions Cups. Sixteen different Top 14 sides have provided the opposition so far. A 17th awaits as they look ahead to their last pool date with Bayonne next week.
The Basques haven’t impressed on their return to this competition, losing their opener at home to the Stormers and shipping gallons of points to Harlequins and then Leicester before this final appointment against the four-time winners at Stade Jean-Dauger.
This is the point where Leo Cullen spells out all sorts of dangers ahead, like an attendant at a fairground warbling warnings of ghosts and ghouls on a mystery train ride ultimately peppered with rubber monsters and dodgy sound effects.
“Yeah, we need to prepare for that. I know they lost to Stormers at home [but] they have won all their games at home in the Top 1. They had the best record of all the teams during the course of last season, home record that is.”
In fairness to the Leinster head coach, he has done his due diligence.
The November Test window provided him the space to take a Busman’s holiday with his dad and son. They took in Bayonne’s 49-7 win against Montauban so he knows something of the unique atmosphere that has made the ground one to be feared for visiting teams.
“It's class. I was in with the Montauban fans. Bayonne hammered them that day.”
Leinster will go there in good nick in terms of the Pool 3 table given they have secured 14 of 15 available match points, but how they bagged five against Ronan O’Gara’s La Rochelle two days ago is still something of a mystery.
Leinster flew from the traps, Joshua Kenny haring up his wing to bag two tries inside nine minutes for a 12-0 lead before a handful of interruptions broke the flow and fed into a one-hour period of absolute La Rochelle domination.
The visitors actually made eight uninterrupted 22 entries between the 28th and 64 minutes but a converted Davit Niniashvili try, a Nolann Le Garrec penalty and a converted Ihaia West try was poor reward for all those waves of pressure.
Other gilt-edged chances came and went besides, the most blatant when Remi Ward dropped the ball a few metres out with no-one home 47 minutes in, and all that left the door open for Leinster to scuttle through it.
Robbie Henshaw and Josh van der Flier claimed a pair of unconverted scores to reclaim the lead before West struck again. Then Harry Byrne absorbed the pressure of an injury-time penalty to claim the bulk of the spoils by the slimmest of margins.
O’Gara, with a flight to catch, didn’t do any media after the game. Cullen described him as being “in good form” but he must have been frustrated at how his team, so impressive in so many ways for so long, got mugged here at the end.
Make no mistake: it was a mugging.
Leinster can and did hail the character they showed and have displayed time and again already this season: in their round two win away to Leicester Tigers, in edging Munster in Thomond Park, and recovering for a big deficit at home to Ulster.
But Cullen and Caelan Doris were under no illusions afterwards about the fact that they are still “far from perfect”. Not least without the ball where they suffered 12 line breaks against them and missed 38 tackles.
“Yeah, I don't mind missed tackles with the right intent, so that's the thing,” said Cullen. “Listen, when you pull the game apart, as we always will, it was far from perfect out there so you are always going to get that, but again, the right mindset overall.
“So we need to get better because [of all] the quality teams in the competition - and I know people who want to keep giving out about the competition, but it was an amazing game out there for people to watch. I'd rather go with the positive.”
He’s right in that.
This was the seventh meeting between these two inside five years and the fifth to be decided by less than a score. If there were too many stop-starts then the intensity of it, and the intermittent quality of attacking rugby, was breathtaking.
There were standout displays. La Rochelle’s 20-year old centre Simeli Daunivucu is a gem of a player. Le Garrec is sublime at scrum-half and Levani Botia continues to do Levani Botia things on both sides of the ball. The man is superhuman.
The visitors were without nine injured players, the hosts were devoid of eleven. For Leinster, the most vulnerable area of concern was in the front row where there was no Tadhg Furlong, Andrew Porter, Rabah Slimani or Jack Boyle.
Paddy McCarthy’s accelerated learning curve continued with a start at loosehead, Tom Clarkson propped at tight for all 80 minutes and Jerry Cahir’s graduation from AIL last season hot new levels with a first Champions Cup appearance.
All reason for cheer, but no-one should get carried away.
C Frawley; T O’Brien, R Ioane, R Henshaw, JJ Kenny; S Prendergast, J Gibson-Park; p McCarthy, D Sheehan, T Clarkson; J McCarthy, J Ryan; J Conan, J van der Flier, C Doris.
J Cahir for P McCarthy (43); M Deegan for Conan (47-52 and 78); H Byrne for A Osborne and R Kelleher for Sheehan (both 60); L McGrath for Gibson-Park (78).
D Leyds; J Nowell, J Favre, S Daunivucu, D Niniashvili; I West, N Le Garrec; R Wardi, T Latu, U Atonio; C Kante Samba, W Skelton; O Jegou, L Botia, G Alldritt.
A Hastoy for Favre (17); L Penvern for Wardi, and A Kuntelia for Atonio (both 55); Q Lespiaucq for Latu (60); K Douglas for Skelton (69); K Fraindt for Botia (69); N Bollengier for Niniashvili (74); T Berjon for Le Garrec (78).
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