To have come so far and come up fractionally short will only make the task of returning to base camp at the start of next season seem even steeper, albeit the prize is a final in the Aviva.
While the pain of a second final defeat was etched all over Johnny Sexton’s crestfallen face, Leo Cullen tried to say all the right things at a time when he would surely have preferred to be left alone with his thoughts.
There’ll be plenty of time for them now, but in the aftermath of Saturday’s devastating 24-21 defeat in the Champions Cup final by La Rochelle at the Stade Vélodrome, the Leinster head coach gave his full congratulations to La Rochelle and declined to make any issue of Wayne Barnes’ refereeing when offered the bait to do so.
Pending a deeper debrief of this latest Euro heartbreak, Leinster had to turn the page he said toward next Saturday’s URC quarter-final against Glasgow at the RDS. But there was inevitably a certain hollowness to that prospect and what he admitted was now a huge mental challenge.
Markets in Vienna or Christmas at The Shelbourne? 10 holiday escapes over the festive season
Ciara Mageean: ‘I just felt numb. It wasn’t even sadness, it was just emptiness’
Stealth sackings: why do employers fire staff for minor misdemeanours?
Carl and Gerty Cori: a Nobel Prizewinning husband and wife team
“We’ve just got to turn our attention to what’s next, and that’s a quarter-final in the URC against Glasgow at the RDS, and hopefully we’ll have a big crowd. That’s the thing in terms of that real mental strength in terms of the playing group, and staff as well, to try turn it around and get ready to go again.
“We’ve another competition to focus our attention on and, for the playing group, there will probably be some painful lessons from the game. When you lose a game of this magnitude there always is, but it’s just turn our attention now and try win another trophy, the URC.”
But the pain ran deep into the whole organisation.
“The players on the field are absolutely devastated, then you have the players up in the stand as well and there is probably more of those guys crying than the players on the field. It means so much to the group.
“Anyway, we haven’t won the game today, hats off to La Rochelle, they came with a plan. It’s effective in lots of things that they do. We’re very, very close to winning the tournament, and we don’t unfortunately. But now we just need to dust ourselves off to try and turn the page quite quickly, because we’ll do a deeper review in looking to this game, similar to what we did last year.
“It’s painful, but when you see the crowds at the end, fantastic Leinster support here but what, 2/3rds of the crowd [were supporting La Rochelle]. There’s elation at the end, what it means to them, but that’s what makes the tournament so magical as well. Turn the page, next challenge, dust ourselves off and go again.”
Coming to terms with how they underperformed by the wonderful standards they’ve set this season in Europe will be tough, but the cruellest cut of all on Saturday was that, by somehow holding out La Rochelle for so long, Leinster left themselves no time for a restart.
“You can’t fault the effort,” said Cullen, and ne’er a truer word. “There are bits in the game that we don’t quite execute at stages, different parts of our game that puts us under undue pressure, but that’s what you’re expecting with this kind of game anyway, it’s high stakes and high pressure against a French team, away in France.
“There’ll be some good learning for some young guys in particular for the future, because we’re always desperate to win this tournament, properly desperate. You can see La Rochelle, losing two finals last year, you can see the sense of desperation.
“At 18-10 we looked in control, a few decisions, a bounce of a ball, fine margins. Prior to that there are a few things in the game, we camped on their line, a similar situation to them at the end of the game. We built the scoreboard pressure, which was the right decision. There are a few parts of the game we don’t manage well, and we get ourselves in trouble.”
Since their double in 2018 a URC title would be a consolation prize for the fourth season in a row, as that fifth star is what they coveted the most, It’s akin to altering the focus from the Champions Cup to the Europa League, and Sexton couldn’t bring himself to say otherwise.
“We judge ourselves off both but ultimately, yeah, I can’t contradict what I said yesterday, this is the one that everyone wants to win. This is the one we desperately wanted to win and we’ve come within 60 seconds of it. It’s a pretty bad dressing room to be in at the moment.
“We have to dust ourselves off. It’s an incredible tournament, so hard to win, to think of all the good teams are in it and only one gets to walk away with the prize. La Rochelle got to do that today.”
Alas, that’s the bottom line.
