Eddie O'Sullivan

It was a sense of relief that we dodged a bullet here.

And then the frustration that he's probably carried with him for a while, that he doesn't feel Leinster have gotten their dues over the years.

And do you know what?

There's a point to that too, Joe.

You know what I mean?

If you said, here's a team that have been at the semi-final or the final of this tournament, year in, year out, year in, year out, have just come up agonisingly short, they must be doing something right.

And then you get all the negativity when it goes wrong.

You might say, we might be better off going out in the first round, it wouldn't be half as much hassle, which is a bit facetious, but...

My point is that he's listened to that every year.

It does great on you, you know.

And I think he knew they dodged a catastrophic bullet on the weekend.

And I think the emotion of it got to him eventually, you know.

He just felt, you guys aren't giving us our due.

We're playing this razor-tight game against these behemoths of teams and we get no credit.

But he knows with heart of hearts that it was awful close to being probably the most difficult press conference of his career and for Leinster.

So...

I think the emotion got the better of him, and I think he probably overstayed his case too, just did his fair bit, so he did get a bit of a kick in, but I suppose when you're the top dog for so long, there's an element of you don't get too much, you don't get as much credit as you feel you should, and you get probably hammered a little bit on the negative stuff more than any other team would, so I think there's two sides to it, I just thought it was a shock reaction for him, realising that he faced

He faced catastrophe and got around the other side of it.

And literally straight after the game, so you're still in the zone, you know?

The Lions.