HEINEKEN CUP QUARTER-FINALS:IT'S BEEN a glorious ride for the Irish over the last decade and more, but if there is a regret it's that a genuinely golden crop might have more medals to show for their efforts. For example, there is a second Heineken Cup in this Leinster team, and having won it two seasons ago they're not of a mind to settle for anything less.

As one of that golden generation, Gordon D’Arcy is a case in point and afterwards he gave an insight into this squad’s mentality. “I think Leinster five, six or seven years ago might have been doing a lap of honour and going ‘yay, brilliant’ and ‘this is the best thing ever’ whereas now it’s like ‘right, we’ve won a game but we’ve Ulster next week and we want to stay in the hunt in the Magners League, we want to win this Heineken Cup’. That wasn’t our final today, that’s a big thing we’ve learned from playing over the years – whereas you get big wins, the next win is going to have to be bigger.”

The game was of “international standard” he admitted and hence “we’ll take a lot of heart from that”, though he was still aggrieved “we butchered a few tries. We were reliant on our defence a bit too much.” That said, D’Arcy maintained Leinster were “without a shadow of a doubt the better team”.

Two Leinster stalwarts stole some of the light, a normal event for Isa Nacewa (is there a better fullback in Europe right now?), less so for the comparatively unheralded Richardt Strauss. “It gets kind of boring when he’s that good,” joked D’Arcy of Nacewa. “He’s probably one of the best players I’ve played with in any shape, way or form. Probably the biggest compliment I can give him is that in training when he is running I sometimes get caught looking at him. He’s just moving and it’s bouncing and he’s just through the gap and you kind of forget to run your support line because you’re looking at him going ‘that’s brilliant’ and then you realise he’s left you for dead and you should be in the support line.

“He makes it look easy and he makes it look like he has time on the ball. They always say that about great soccer players, that they always look like they have time on the ball. Isa just looks like he has time on the ball all the time. He just creates space, whether it’s just shifting the ball to the left, someone has a little thing and then he has a go. We’re convinced it has something to do with the hair, the wave.”

“Isa Nacewa’s try was another spark from him,” said coach Joe Schmidt. “He has played every single game we have played: pre-season, Magners, Heineken, every game we have played this season. Thankfully he is not paid minute by the minute but he has done a fantastic job for us.”

Of his 25 competitive starts, Nacewa has played the full 80 all but twice – this being his seventh try of the campaign and third in successive Heineken Cup games – and similarly Strauss has started 24 games. A clever capture off South Africa’s remarkable conveyor belt of hookers, Strauss has the ball-carrying skills and abilities of a converted openside in the tackle area to make him an Irish international when he qualifies by residency. His performance merited a try-scoring offload to Luke Fitzgerald but for the winger over-running the ball.

“If you look at the tackles, certainly dominant tackles, he made some absolute pearlers,” said Schmidt, “and also his tackle on Anthony Allen when Allen tried to go around him on the 22. His angle into that tackle and footwork was superb. On attack there was obviously that line break where he also managed to break the Tuilagi tackle. He has given us a really dynamic dimension.”

D’Arcy admitted Seán O’Brien’s corner flagging of Alesana Tuilagi was the winning and the losing of the game. “I kind of saw it early on,” reflected O’Brien, “and I just took a chance on it from this side of the field and took off for the corner. I didn’t think he’d get that far but I suppose I just threw myself at him and it paid off, thank God.

“I think we only played for 40 minutes last week to be honest,” he admitted, “and I think there was a lot of lads hurting and we wanted to put that right today. The atmosphere out there was unbelievable and the crowd got right behind us and it made a big difference to us to drive us on.”

Leicester bore their disappointment well. “We had opportunities to win,” reflected Richard Cockerill. “We created enough chances to score points and we didn’t take them. Against good sides you have to take them and if you don’t it comes back to bite you on the backside and Leinster were smart enough to keep themselves in the game, to keep the scoreboard ticking over and we just gave ourselves too much to do.”

Tom Croft acknowledged Leinster “have got a very good chance” of winning the cup. “They have got a strong team and they tackle very hard and they have got strong runners and players who can create great things and they could potentially go on and win this competition.”

Only that will suffice for them.