Joe McCarthy: 'Every season, if you don't win a trophy, you feel pretty inadequate'

Leinster's Joe McCarthy. Pic: Grace Halton/Inpho

Jose Mourinho used it. Mikel Arteta has embraced it. Jim McGuinness excels at it. There really is nothing like a good old siege mentality to focus the mind and steel a dressing-room to a common cause.

That was Leinster last year.

The province had just accounted for Glasgow in the URC semi-final when Joe McCrathy joined the RTÉ panel pitchside at the Aviva Stadium and opened up on the motivations for a side looking to claim its first trophy in four years.

“We know everyone loves to hate Leinster and that really drives us on,” Big Joe said.

A week later and they were champions after a stonking big defeat of the Bulls across the Liffey at Croke Park. Now they’re back at GAA headquarters against the same opposition and with the same prize up for grabs.

Another similarity? Leinster are still copping flak, maybe more of it given the ease with which Bordeaux-Begles powered past them to win the Champions Cup last month, but that us-against-the-world mentality tends to come with a sell-by-date.

Railing against everyone and everything can be exhausting.

Players and teams need other prompts to go that extra mile. The rugby season is never-ending, one blending blurrily into another, and hunger must be all the harder to nurse given it’s a year now since McCarthy and so many of his clubmates hooked up with the Lions.

One obvious spur is the fact that Leinster will wave off more than a few key men this weekend. James Lowe, Luke McGrath, Will Connors, Ciaran Frawley and Rabah Slimani: the plan is to give them something shiny on their way out the door.

The squad has spoken about how no team has gone back-to-back in the short history of the URC. And no club has yet to win it twice. Memories of the day and the trophy lift this time last year get the juices flowing too.

Fear can be another useful prod.

“The expectation to be a Leinster player when you're younger is to win medals and trophies so you feel kind of inadequate if you don't,” said McCarthy. “Every season if you don't win a trophy, you feel pretty inadequate.

“I remember playing my first Leinster game and losing and I was like, ‘Jeez’, you feel horrendous. My first Leinster game I lost. I remember feeling horrendous because you're quite used to winning in Leinster. That's what you associate with them.

“So yeah, 100 percent, you’re pretty motivated to win a trophy.” McCarthy brings more than motivation. He has been one of Leinster’s best players in the last few months and he doesn’t disagree that this might owe something to the fact that he sat out the club season until early December with a foot injury.

The Bulls bring the usual South African cocktail of brute force up front to Friday’s URC final, a clever kicking game and the odd few wizards out wide who can cut a defence to shreds in no time at all. McCarthy’s mind is on the physical contest.

No surprise there.

His importance in the lineout has magnified this season but if there’s one thing he seems to enjoy, and excel at, more than anything else lately its in his ability to mess up an attempted maul and there’s an art as well as physicality to all that.

“It’s all down to feel. I love going for it, I've always gone for it. I've probably got a lot of reps at doing it.

“I don't get it in every game because sometimes it's hard and I'm coming away where teams get pretty good at blocking, staying tight, but definitely just hitting the sweet spot, like wrestling through or getting under it. So there’s a few different ways to get in.” 

Judge this game in isolation and it’s a doozy. Leinster are laced with Ireland stars, the Bulls are heavily-laden with Boks and have an eight-match winning run behind them and revenge in their nostrils after that heavy decider loss here last time.

The wider context dulls that. Leinster haven’t hit top gear this season, the Champions Cup final loss lingers and there is a fatigue among their fans for ‘big’ games with this being their seventh knockout tie in recent months.

McCarthy has friends who see a Friday evening kickoff as the perfect excuse to head towards Jones’ Road straight after work and, as a man born in New York, he paid close attention to the way the Knicks caught the city’s zeitgeist in winning their first NBA title since 1973.

He’s not expecting scenes to match that here, not with ticket sales just creeping past 35,000 for a stadium that holds 82,300, but he’s got a point when it comes to the difference a passionate home crowd can make.

“It’s a final at home in Croke Park on Friday night, you don't get many of those. It's something that we love playing in and it gives us such a lift. We want to make it as good as possible.

“You see the New York Knicks, all the fans going crazy, everyone in the city buzzing. I don't think it's going to be like that, the Knicks fans kind of messed the city up as well. Leinster fans are a bit more chill than that.”