Stuart Lancaster’s move to Racing 92 at the end of this season could be finalised by the end of this week. Leinster’s senior coach is set to have a video meeting over the weekend with the Parisian club’s benefactor cum president Jacky Lorenzetti and current head coach Laurent Travers, and French sources have told The Irish Times that Lancaster’s departure to Racing 92 now looks all but certain.
All that remains is for Lancaster and the Racing hierarchy to agree on his exact role at the Paris club, with Travers set to assume more of a director of rugby or administrative role, as he still wants to retain some influence on the running of the team. Either way, Lancaster is in line to become Racing’s new head coach or adopt a senior coach role akin to his existing remit with Leinster in time for the 2023-24 season.
It is even conceivable that Travers might become the new Racing 92 president, freeing up Lorenzetti to concentrate more on his various real estate and wine businesses. The final details have still to be resolved but presuming agreement is reached on Lancaster’s hands-on coaching role, it is expected he will end his association with Leinster after the 2022-23 season – his seventh with the province.
The 52-year-old former Leeds Tykes director of rugby and England head coach was enlisted by Leo Cullen and Leinster at the start of the 2016-17 season and despite some ill-advised misgivings in the media, notably in the UK, Lancaster has had a truly transformative and profound effect on the province.
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Making light of his commute from Leeds and revelling in a more hands-on coaching role at a province with a conveyor belt of young talent, Lancaster’s high tempo, continuity-focused and exhaustive Tuesday training sessions were quickly nicknamed ‘Stuesdays’ by the players, for whom he has been a hugely influential and popular figure.
In the season before he joined, 2015-16, Leinster won just one of six pool matches in the Champions Cup and were beaten in the Pro 12 final by Connacht in Murrayfield, with a win-loss ratio of 60 per cent and averaging two tries per game.
Although Leinster lost in the semi-finals of both the Champions Cup, away to Clermont Auvergne, and in the Pro 12, at home to the Scarlets, in Lancaster’s first campaign, those figures rose to exactly 80 per cent and four tries per game and they have been pretty much replicated, and sometimes bettered, in every season since.
In his second season with the province, Leinster completed the double of Champions Cup and Pro 14, beating Racing 15-12 in the final in Bilbao and then, in the next two weeks, beating Munster in the semi-finals and the Scarlets by 40-32 in the final of the Pro 14 at the Aviva Stadium.
In each of his six seasons with Leinster they have topped their Champions Cup pool and Pro14/URC table or conference, maintaining those win-loss ratios and try-scoring averages, while completing four Pro 14 titles in a row. Leinster have also consistently come close to that cherished fifth star and have been a little unlucky in not doing so.
They lost an epic tussle in the 2019 final at St James’ Park against Saracens and against the same opponents in a rearranged quarter-final behind closed doors at the Aviva Stadium the following year; their only defeat of the season as they won the Pro 14 with 17 wins out of 17. Saracens were subsequently found guilty of breaches of the Premiership salary cap which resulted in them being demoted to the English championship.
In 2020-21 Leinster lost away to La Rochelle in the semi-finals and last season, after topping practically every metric in the Champions Cup when scoring 47 tries in eight matches and averaging almost five tries per game across the season, they lost what was effectively an ‘away’ final in Marseille against La Rochelle in the last play of the game.
This was compounded by a 27-26 loss in the URC semi-final at home to the Bulls, leaving Leinster trophy-less for the first time in Lancaster’s time at the province. That will no doubt intensify Leinster’s hunger to reclaim silverware this season and especially so now given this 2022-23 campaign will now almost certainly be Lancaster’s last at the province, as will definitely be the case for talismanic captain Johnny Sexton.
Following on from Argentina luring Felipe Contepomi home as assistant coach to the Pumas at the end of last season, with a view to him succeeding Michael Cheika after next year’s World Cup, and Denis Leamy being lured back to Munster, in some respects Leinster are paying a price for their success and their inventive brand of attacking rugby.
True, every rugby team needs an injection of fresh voices and thinking. Even so, the departure of Contepomi, Leamy and now Lancaster, as well as Sexton, in a 12-month period – not to mention Mick Dawson moving on in November after 21 years as Leinster chief executive, and something of an overhaul last summer following the departure or retirement of nine players – the Leinster machine is evidently facing its most challenging time since the arrival of Cheika in 2005, if not bigger.
