Chapter 1: 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.
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Chapter 2: How did Leinster's endgame strategy affect their chances against Bordeaux?
Can you imagine if that, through a succession of injuries, happened eight minutes into the final against Bordeaux?
Well, especially when much of their game plan is kick the ball into space and let your man with the red scrum cap chase after it.
That was exactly going to be my next point. It's unfair to ask somebody to do that because even, say, Harry Byrne struggles to get into position quickly enough. But again, lesson learned for him when he's in the backfield, it's been that the thankless running that you get set early
in the backfield that you're there as the ball is arriving and it's what people expect but it's when you let the ball bounce that's when people start looking going oh why is it bouncing but Bordeaux are excellent on that transition piece so I think to put somebody that's not been doing that for their whole life to ask them to come in and to do that I think it's unfair to the player but then it's also tying one hand behind your back as a team.
Just to wrap up the Prendergast point, because he's obviously got some criticism for that Gael Dray on try when he has a couple of goes at him and he can't bring him down. On one hand, Darce, your head does just go to, look, this has been a longstanding issue. At some point, the player needs to take responsibility. A teammate needs to talk to him, whatever it is.
I'd like to get your perspective on that as given your position. But also there comes a point where there is just that stick to beat him with no matter what. And he could go three, four or five matches. Like, for example, after the Ulster game, nobody was talking about Sam Prendergast's bad defense and bad tackle technique. And it has been pretty good for a couple of weeks.
But it's just one of those things now where... Well, it hasn't been tested for a couple of weeks, is what I would say. Well, I mean, Steve McCluskey definitely ran down his channel up in Belfast a few weeks ago a few times. And I don't remember there being any howlers. But yeah, OK, it's not been detested in this regard. My point being, it's just something that's going to hang over him.
And the second anything goes wrong, it's going to be something that a lot of people jump on.
For that small bit of his game, which is obviously half of the game, it needs the season to be over for almost the reset to go into it. I think there's a limited amount of time you can give to that skill, but it's going to be an uncomfortable pre-season for him when he finishes the season because it is going to be something that he needs to work on. But You look at where he missed the tackles.
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