If Leinster had taken a bonus-point win from Newport against the Dragons in the Pro 12 last weekend it would have been hailed on two fronts: first it would have kept them within grabbing distance of the top four; and second it would have been a mental leg-up for the journey to Marseille, where Toulon await in the European Champions Cup semi-final on Sunday.
Instead they lost a game they looked to have sewn up. By the next day as they turned up for work, according to their Wasps-bound fly-half Jimmy Gopperth, that league defeat had been filed away, out of sight and out of mind. “Look, our form hasn’t been great coming in,” he says. “I thought the first 50 minutes was very good. We put them under a lot of pressure and led 22-8 and then slipped a couple of simple tries.
“It does hurt. That’s the league. As soon as that game was finished and we came in Monday morning it was cup rugby. It was a one-off game so just draw a line in the sand and look forward to this game. A lot of guys were out and didn’t play in that game, a lot of guys playing their first game for a long time, so it was a little bit disjointed. Now we have the opportunity to put things right.”
If they are to succeed on that front then another result that will need to be squared away is last season’s European quarter-final, when Toulon beat Leinster with a bit to spare, running out 29-14 winners. Matt O’Connor’s team came second on a few fronts that day, and while there will be a few new faces on each team and the match will take place away from Toulon’s home ground, the Stade Félix Mayol, the reigning champions will still be the ones at short odds.
“Looking back at the footage of that game we were pretty disappointed,” Gopperth says. “There was a lot of opportunities we left out there. We didn’t play well and yet 60-odd minutes in we were still in touch with them. So we’re going to take a lot of lessons out of that game and a lot of positives but we’re going down to their patch and they are probably the best team in the world at the moment, with all the superstars. It’s going to be a hell of a task but we will give it every shot.
“You’ve got to make your first-up shots, first-up tackles, because they’re big men. They’re going to run at you and if you don’t make your first-up shots they are going to get in behind you and get momentum. Then the likes of [Matt] Giteau, [Drew] Mitchell and [Mathieu] Bastareaud will just keep coming at you.
“So, defence is going to be a massive key for us. When we’ve got the ball we’ve got to respect it and look after it – try to move them around the pitch because they’re a big unit. If we do those two things well then we are going to give ourselves an opportunity.”
Against a team with such powerful poachers as Bastareaud, Steffon Armitage and Chris Masoe the bit about hanging on to the ball will be tricky. And when Leinster have been slowed down this season it has killed their try count.
“People know we like to play with fast ball and every opportunity we get to attack, teams just seem to be killing the ball straight away to not let us play,” Gopperth says. “They’d rather give away three points than let us score tries. It was pretty obvious against Bath that every time we got in a very good attacking position they’d just give away three points. That won us the game. It’s frustrating but we can’t give them momentum and have to take it on ourselves, making sure that when we carry we fight a little bit harder and get our cleaners in a bit quicker so they can’t infringe and we can create some opportunities to score tries.”
They were doing that pretty well in Newport last Sunday. Another collapse and Leinster’s season will be ending early.
