D’Arcy on Leinster being bullied; Time for Kildare to end Dublin’s Leinster dominance?

“Can this La Rochelle side bully Leinster? I’m not convinced they can. The emergence from a Leinster perspective of one of the best frontrows in the world, assuming Tadhg Furlong is fit, the fact that Caelan Doris and Josh van der Flier can, at a minimum, match Gregory Alldritt and Victor Vito bodes well.” Gordon D’Arcy believes that Leinster match up better to La Rochelle in the upcoming Champions Cup final than they did when losing to them at the semi-final stage last season. As he explains in his column this morning, despite that optimism, a performance short of Leinster’s best capabilities, which we saw against the likes of Leicester and Toulouse earlier on in the competition, will not be enough to stitch that fifth star onto the jersey.

This weekend is the most shambolic in recent memory in terms of GAA scheduling, as far as Darragh Ó Sé is concerned. “A Munster final at three o’clock on a Saturday afternoon in Killarney is an abomination. If you ever wanted to tell people that this competition is not important, you’d hide it away at three o’clock on a huge sporting Saturday. And if that isn’t bad enough, following it with a Leinster football final at the same time as the European rugby final is madness. Leinster’s biggest support bases are in Dublin and around where all that good land is in Kildare. Any eejit could have told you in January that Leinster would be in the rugby final and Kildare and Dublin would be in the football.” A conundrum then for Dublin/Kildare based rugby and GAA fans. Forced to chose between watching the Champions Cup of Leinster Championship final, which one would you go for? For something that was thrown together on the hoof in response to the now defunct All-Ireland football quarter-final groups (Super 8s), the provincial round-robins in hurling have proved a surprisingly resilient success. So says Seán Moran, who in his column this morning explains how the fact that all teams had something to play for in the last round of games rubber stamps the format as a success.

Last night saw confirmation come through that the Premier League had announced that its board approved the £4.25 billion (€5 billion) takeover of Chelsea by Todd Boehly’s consortium after all prospective board members passed its owners’ and directors’ test. The impending takeover is still subject to approval from the UK government, which wants to be satisfied that none of the proceeds will go to Roman Abramovich, who was hit with sanctions after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and to get guarantees regarding his £1.6 billion (€1.87 billion) loan to the club.

Yesterday saw racing history made as the Conor O’Dwyer-trained Sawbuck matched the record for being the biggest priced winner in the history of Irish racing, coming home after starting at 300-1. The trainer’s son Charlie, 19, did the steering on Sawbuck and reported: “He’s been in great form at home and, after his last two runs over hurdles, I came here thinking if he could finish somewhere in the middle I would have been delighted. The minute the flag dropped he travelled great and I couldn’t fault him anywhere. He got a bit close to the last but he’s done it fairly handily enough. He likes that ground and is Flat bred and has run in Dundalk. The ground isn’t a problem for him.”