Leinster survive rollercoaster finale against Toulon to reach Champions Cup final
Caelan Doris' converted second half try had put Leinster 29-11 ahead in their Champions Cup semi-final against Toulon. Pic: Sam Barnes/Sportsfile
Leinster came oh-so-close to suffering yet another Champions Cup nightmare on Saturday afternoon, the province just about managing to hold off a late surge from a brave Toulon to claim its place in the Bilbao final later this month.
Leading by 18 points with just 13 minutes to play, Leo Cullen’s side were very nearly reeled in by a Top 14 team that hit them for two converted tries and came within the tips of Seta Tuicuvu’s fingers of turfing them out.
Defeat would have been torture. More of it.
It’s 12 months since Leinster were sucker-punched at this stage and in this ground by Northampton Saints in a last four tie that followed hot on the heels of three successive losses in the competition’s decider.
The province now awaits the winners of Sunday’s second semi-final between reigning champions Bordeaux-Begles and Bath in France. Neither will see reason to fear the next step should they make it to the San Mames stadium in the Basque Country.
Inconsistent and frustrating all season, Leinster carried that into the game.
Some of their attacking rugby in the first-half was absolutely sublime, and the foundations for a dominant scrum were laid early, and yet they ended the period with just a three-point lead and down to 13 players against a Toulon outfit that made enough of the home side’s blips to hang in there and more.
The mistakes started early with Harry Byrne’s boot guilty of more than a few. The No.10 missed a simple penalty early on, missed a penalty to touch, skewed another one short and sent a restart dead. All inside a dozen minutes.
The flow of the game wasn’t helped by a succession of stoppages, most alarmingly 15 minutes in when Mikheili Shioshvili steamrolled Robbie Henshaw who needed five minutes of attention from seven medics before being stretchered off.
A thumbs up from Henshaw on his departure was a relief for everyone.
Leinster had opened the scoring not long before that when some slick passing off the base of the ruck by Jamison Gibson-Park and hard, clever running from his forwards set up Jack Conan to carry three opponents over.
Byrne’s conversion made it 7-0 and they should have had another four minutes later when referee Luke Pearce harshly ruled out a Gibson-Park try under the posts for what he interpreted as a knock-on at the base.
It took umpteen replays for the TMO and ref to decide. It should have stood.
Melvyn Jaminet had already pinched a penalty for Toulon and he hit another after 25 minutes before Josh van der Flier finished off a tap penalty routine that caught the Toulon defence off balance with a simple shift in direction.
Up 14-6 now, Leinster found themselves scrambling from there to the break.
Andrew Porter saw yellow for a high tackle on Shioshvili and then Harry Byrne followed for repeated team infringements in the run-up to Tuicuvu’s opening Toulon try when they expertly manoeuvred the understrength province out of position out wide.
Jaminet did at least miss the difficult conversion but Leinster fans weren’t happy when no action was taken against Charles Ollivon whose tackle on a scrambling and panicking Rieko Ioane may have caught the All Black high before the break.
Either way, Leinster’s litany of errors and indiscipline, allied to Toulon’s stubbornness, had conspired to leave this at 14-11 come the interval and Leinster needing to ride out the opening passages of the second-half until they could return to 15 men.
They did much more than that.
Having the kick-off allowed them to pin Toulon back and they followed it with three minutes of incessant pressure and, eventually, a Garry Ringrose try off another tap penalty trickeroo. It was a deeply impressive response to adversity.
Ringrose missing the conversion in Byrne’s temporary absence continued the theme of Leinster making things a bit too hard for themselves, but they were soon back to 15 men and 22-11 to the good with a Byrne three-pointer off their fifth scrum penalty of the day.
Things were looking up. But a long way from done.
Toulon brought on half of their bench in one wave in the same breath as their hooker’s return from the sinbin, just as Jack Conan was walking off, and eight minutes after Josh van der Flier had left for a HIA.
Byrne missed another kick at the posts just past the hour to keep the pot boiling longer but Caelan Doris engineered more breathing space when burrowing over from a metre out with just over a dozen minutes to go.
Up 29-11 with the conversion, Leinster still didn’t look comfortable. This, after all, is a side that led 29-0 away to Ulster last month and conceded three tries inside ten minutes. So none of what happened next was all that shocking.
Toulon got one back from the restart, replacement nine Baptiste Serin tricking his way over from a ruck inches from the line. Ten minutes still to go. And still four when Gael Drean took a crosskick and dismissed an awful Sam Prendergast tackle to claim another.
Jaminet tacking on all four points left it 29-25 with time still to play, and it looked like curtains for Leinster when Drean ran clear down the wing and, when caught by Ioane, offloaded infield to the supporting Tuicuvu.
The pass was low and difficult and the Fijian just failed to clutch it when open grass and an unprotected try line had opened up for him. Yes, it was that close. It’s on to a fifth final now for Leinster since their last title – in Bilbao – back in 2018.
More of this won’t bridge that gap and Leinster will be hoping for good news on the injuries to Henshaw, Conan, van der Flier and Tommy O'Brien after their early exits, and on Ryan Baird and Tadhg Furlong who sat this one out. Eighty minutes from that title, but a lot of work still to do.
H Keenan; T O’Brien, G Ringrose, R Henshaw, R Ioane; H Byrne, J Gibson-Park; A Porter, D Sheehan, T Clarkson; J McCarthy, J Ryan; J Conan, J van der Flier, C Doris.
J Osborne for Henshaw (15); S Penny for van der Flier (47); J Cahir for Ioane (temp, 40-43) and for Porter (75); A Soroka for Conan (56); S Prendergast for O’Brien (69); R Slimani for Clarkson (70); R Kelleher for Sheehan (75).
M Jaminet; G Dréan, JI Brex, J Sinzelle, S Tuicuvu; T Albornoz, B White; JB Gros, T Baubigny, K Sinckler; C Mezou, D Ribbans; J Kpoku, C Ollivon, M Shioshvili.
B Gigashvili for Sinckler, Z Mercer for Shioshvili, E Abadie for Kpoku and B Serin for White (all 55); D Brennan for Gros and M Halagahu for Mezou (both 61); G Lucchesi for Baubigny (67).
L Pearce (Eng).
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