It's all in the bounce of the ball

As Marc Stcherbina led the chase to the last-play kick downfield by Ovidiu Tonita, lives seemed to flash before our eyes. Certainly Leinster's season did. There was even time to work out that the putative conversion would have been a gimme for Dimitri Yachvili, given he'd nailed one from the touchline just before that.

A better bounce for Stcherbina, allowing him just to hack it on, and there wouldn't have been much that the chasing Girvan Dempsey could have done about it. A split second earlier with his tackle and it would have been too early - Steve Lander later claimed he would have given a penalty try. It was all in the timing.

"The initial thought that went through my mind was that he was going to catch it on the full and go in under the sticks," admitted Dempsey, still heaving a sigh of relief about an hour afterwards. "I just couldn't believe it, because we had the game under control but we just took our foot off the gas. It was our own fault.

"But then, after that, when I saw him check for the bounce of the ball, the next thing that went through my mind was 'don't tackle him early'. Let him gather it and then take him. A split second earlier and we were in trouble. When I did tackle him I was trying to play the ball but when he offloaded it I thought we were in trouble again. Thankfully the guys scrambled well, but that game should have been wrapped up a lot earlier."

Dempsey admitted that a degree of complacency had crept into Leinster's mindset from halfway through the second period. "If yer man had got over it would have been a horrible end to the season," acknowledged Dempsey.

The fractional line between hero and villain at the end made Dempsey think of Al Pacino's pre-match speech as coach to an American football team in the Oliver Stone movie Any Given Sunday - "Inches, inches, inches". "He says, which is so true in sport, that inches can be the winning and losing of things. Had I tackled him a second earlier, penalty try, game over." And season over.

In hindsight, Dempsey was now grateful Leinster had such a fright towards the end of the game.

"We definitely won't get complacent now," he states. "We know there's going to be a lot of work to be done and we have to build on it from here on in.

"But it just shows you, the crowd support was phenomenal, that rugby has gone to a new plane," added Dempsey, with almost a look of awe on his face at the huge transformation he has witnessed in the game.