Ruaidhri O'Connor

awash with cash just cash for everyone yeah it's they're still the only team that Leinster have ever played more than once and not beaten so Leinster played them four times all around that period and lost all four times and Leo Cullen spoke about that once the draw was made

that there's a bit of a score to settle.

He was at the tail end of his playing career and then into the start of his coaching career.

He was forwards coach that year.

I think Ian is completely right to mention the parallels with this year because that was the season I had a bit of a set to Matt O'Connor because I was probably continuously asking him about Leinster's form

And we were in UCD one day, he was sitting beside Jamie, he said when he pushed back, he goes, let me ask you something, how do you classify form?

What do you mean by form?

And we had a big back and forth for the whole press conference was basically cancelled and we just back and forth about form and how Leinster were playing.

And it had been a patchy year, that was the year he ended up losing his job.

Joe Schmidt called a press conference to kind of push back against his comments about the RFU and how he didn't have access to his best players.

It was a tumultuous enough year and yet...

In the middle of it all, Leinster were able to take the best team of their era to extra time.

And I think that it's a reminder that form, to use a cliche, can go out the window in the semi-final.

And if you have a collection of really good players, as Leinster did then and as Leinster do now,

you know all they need is to produce on one day and that was in Marseille which is 40 minutes from Toulon so there was a huge Toulon crowd there there wasn't a massive Leinster crowd who made their way to the velodrome as Ian said the conditions were a bit of a leveller that could be the case again this weekend now Leinster are the favourites this week the tables are turned in that way but

I'd say Leo Cullen will draw a little bit upon it as he starts preparing.

He's good.

He has an encyclopedic knowledge of Leinster rugby in Europe.

He was there for most of it, Leo, and he likes to reference back to it.

And that was a pretty seismic moment, I think, in his coaching career and one that he hasn't forgotten.