Nathan Johns

Hello and welcome to the Counter-Rug Rugby Podcast brought to you by the Irish Times in partnership with Oak Energy.

After Leinster's Champions Cup final defeat to Bordeaux, not to mention Ulster's defeat the previous evening against Montpellier, myself and Gerry Thornley recorded a podcast on Saturday from the San Memos Stadium in Bilbao.

If you want to listen to that instant look back at the weekend, that is in your feed.

But joining me today, as usual, at the start of the week for a bit of a more

measured take and a look at where the two provinces go from here is former Leinster and Ireland centre Gordon Darcy.

Hello, Darce.

I hope you had a good weekend, aside from rugby watching, I suppose.

Well, that's one way of putting it.

Well, your son and everyone else in Bilbao there, I'd say.

It was a heck of a weekend, all right.

Those poor players having to run out in that, but it was definitely more... Start with Ulster.

It was definitely, yeah, the heat was more of a factor in the Ulster game than the Leinster game, I thought.

Richie Murphy was kind of pretty adamant about that afterwards as well.

Like, you know, we asked him about perceptions of this season, et cetera, because the obvious indication is, in hindsight, if you're framing the season as a chance to get to the Champions Cup, it's much easier to beat Glasgow at home to do that than beat Montpellier, who I think, look, a lot of people in Ireland who don't necessarily watch every game at the top 14 definitely didn't realize how good a team they were.

They were very, very impressive.

They're a Champions Cup team.

They were too good for that competition.

Yeah, I mean, Richie made the point.

He said, we got 52 points in the league and no team has ever gotten 52 points and not made it to the top eight.

He felt a little bit hard done by by just how competitive the league was.