Leinster reach a record ninth Champions Cup final
episode
The Counter Ruck: The Irish Times Rugby Podcast
46 min
3 speakers
2 chapters
transcribed 4 months ago
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What were the highlights of Leinster's semi-final performance?
Hello, welcome along to the latest edition of the Counter-Rock Rugby Podcast brought to you by the Irish Times in partnership with Oak Energy. Gordon Darcy and John O'Sullivan are joining us on this bank holiday weekend to review all the European action wins for Leinster and Ulster in their respective Champions and Challenge Cup semi-finals. So both European finals in three weeks time and Bilbao will have Irish representation. Plenty to get into. As always, here are the two lads. Darcy, before we get into the serious stuff, I couldn't help but notice on Instagram over the weekend, you put up a picture of what looked to be a younger individual called Darcy with a very oversized old number 12 jersey over the weekend.
I mean, it's not that long ago you were talking about bringing your kids to the games and they didn't really have any appreciation for who you were or what you did. If they're wearing your jersey, dare I say, they must have some clue what's going on.
bumped into Roland Dunne at the match. We just had a chat and the post-rugby thing came up and he was just talking about a couple of players that he's spoken to over the years that their kids never knew anything about them as... rugby players because they had no rugby memorabilia whatsoever in their house and I had a similar chat with Les Kiss when he was when he came to Ireland as the defence coach Les Kiss is a legend in NRL and And he said one of his regrets was when his kids actually came back to him and went that I never knew how good you were because he had nothing in the house. And he'd never really talked about his achievements or whatever in rugby. It was only his kids. So one of his friends, his son's friend said to him, I was just watching clips of your dad.
It was unbelievable. So I would probably have fallen into that category had I been left up to myself. So it's a long-winded answer now, but there's very little rugby memorabilia in the house. But each of the kids have one jersey in their room, and that happened to be Lennon's, and then that's the one that he wanted to wear to the match. So there you go.
It was the old Navy one, wasn't it? From the 2009 era. Yeah, it's a very nice one. They were spacious. A bit looser fitting.
Roomy, I think you described him. Roomy.
Lennon was like, he was there, what age were you when you wore it? I was like, oh, I was 28 or 29. And he's like, oh, well, I'd be 28 or 29 before I fell into it. I was like... judging by the height of your mum and your in-laws I said you'll probably be filling it by the time you're about 13 so you'll be alright oh he's a tall kid is he yeah he's going to be the smallest person in my own family so
Right. So what did you make of Saturday? It felt like it was like watching Leinster play French teams in Heineken Cup finals of years gone by. That last very nervy end game. You think back to all the La Rochelle games where they lost it in the last 10 minutes. They came very, very close to being a repeat dose of large French packs coming off the bench to win the game.
We look at what Bordeaux did in the last 20 minutes. That has to be a big concern. No semi-finals are ever easy, but you were looking at it going, this is a really composed performance from Leinster. I think they really struggled with the substitutions. I think that really disorganised Leinster and just shows at this level when Toulon, when Baptiste Serin scored that try, there was a notable change in the atmosphere and it suddenly became really tense and that was reflected into what Leinster were doing on the pitch. So the crowd was very much in tune with what was happening on the pitch. So when Leinster, their defence was good, they were creating opportunities, hell up over the line, a couple of TMOs, there was real energy in from the crowd.
But when that momentum flipped, it really was palpable in the stadium. My overarching thing is very positive in that everything that is going to be picked through and trawled through and going, oh, if they do this again, a large part of the final 20 minutes is within Leinster's control.
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Chapters
2 chaptersSpeakers
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