It’s a small mercy, but consigned in their own minds to a daunting semi-final against Toulon in the Stade Vélodrome in Marseille, Leinster were at least grateful to learn that the game has been set for Sunday week, thereby affording them a seven-day turnaround which allows them to pick a stronger team for next Sunday’s crucial Pro12 match against the Dragons in Newport.
The reigning champions duly earned a second consecutive home semi-final with yesterday's 32-18 win over Wasps, in which Frederic Michalak kicked eight from eight for a 22-point haul. Leinster will also be grateful to be playing Toulon in Marseille rather than the Felix Mayol, where they lost 24-16 in the quarters two seasons ago, before Toulon then beat Munster 24-16 in the semi-finals at the Stade Vélodrome in front of 37,000.
Vengeful
A last-gasp penalty by
Marcello Bosch
earned Saracens a somewhat fortunate 12-11 win away to Johnny Sexton’s Racing Metro and thus teed up a repeat of last season’s semi-final against Clermont, which the London club won 46-6 at Twickenham. On Saturday week though, a vengeful Clermont will host Saracens in the Stade Geoffroy-Guichard in St Etienne after Saturday’s stunning 37-5 win over Northampton.
Remarkably, three of the four semi-finalists have reached the last four for the third season running, namely Toulon, Clermont and Saracens, with Leinster effectively replacing Munster as the fourth contender. Between them, Leinster and Toulon have won the last four European Cups, and five of the last six.
“We’re in the top four teams in Europe,” said a bullish Matt O’Connor after Leinster’s 18-15 win over Bath on Saturday. “You can write it up how you like but that is the reality of it. The environment was never in question. The guys work really, really hard all the time to be as good as they can. The external pressures are irrelevant to us.”
Although the restructured itinerary has compressed the knockout stages to finish within six weeks of the Six Nations, O’Connor also maintained that his squad are in a better position physically than when losing to Toulon a year ago.
“We have got a lot of fresh bodies that haven’t played very much rugby that are raring to go, so from that end we will approach it in a little bit different vein. We were a little bit inaccurate early in the game when we had opportunities, especially from unstructured possession and some basic skill execution let us down.
“And the other thing was Toulon played as good as they played in probably 18 months. That probably caught us on the hop a little bit. The guys coming back from the Test environment were pretty positive off the back of the win against France but that was a different juggernaut altogether that we saw in Toulon on that Sunday afternoon, so that caught us on the hop. So we have got to understand that dynamic and prepare for it and make sure we deliver on our bits and keep ourselves in the game.”
Dominance at set-piece
For the third time in this campaign, all of Leinster’s points came from Ian Madigan’s boot and O’Connor conceded: “You’ve probably got to score tries against Toulon to win, I don’t think we’ll have the same dominance at set-piece as we had today.
“You can only play the dynamics, if they’re going to infringe and it makes it very, very hard to get that speed of release and that opportunity to put them to the sword. We did some good things with the ball, there were a couple of genuine try-scoring opportunities that we probably didn’t take.”
“When you’re getting penalties at scrum, it probably nullifies your ability to play from those exchanges which we would back ourselves to outplay most sides from scrums. There was a dynamic at play that we knew and planned for and it’s probably going to be a different dynamic in Toulon.”
When it was put to him that the perception of Leinster not being the force of yore could work in their favour, O'Connor retorted: "No, that's a press opinion. If you ask anybody who we're playing against, they'd have a fair bit of fear in their changing room prior to the game. There's a fair bit of fear when you play Cian Healy, Seán O'Brien, Dev Toner and Jamie Heaslip, Luke Fitzgerald, Rob Kearney and Zane Kirchner – there's a fair bit of fear there. You said it, not me."
