Lancaster: Defeat taught us good lesson

IT’S NOT a lesson anyone in Leinster wanted to get but if they were going to get one and have their winning run brought to an end, then at this early stage of the season is not exactly detrimental to the long road ahead.

Last weekend’s defeat in Toulouse brought Leinster crashing back to reality but the champions must pick themselves up and go again for tomorrow’s trip ton Treviso before Leo Cullen and Stuart Lancaster lose the bulk of their squad to the November series.

There will have been an element of frustration in Leinster HQ this week because they felt that they had learned the same kind of lessons two seasons ago in the Champions Cup semifinal defeat to Clermont.

Dealing with the cauldron of a French atmosphere and avoiding a sloppy start were spoken about but Leinster were unable to avoid the same pitfalls against a fired-up Toulouse side.

“It has taught us a good lesson,” Lancaster (above) said. “I mean the difference between this game and the Clermont game is that the Clermont game was a semi-final, we never got a second chance, whereas in this scenario we can take a lot from that and understand that if you look at Europe last year, it was pretty unique that any team won six and lost none.

“In fact, I think most teams who qualified won four and lost two – Clermont, Munster. Saracens won three, drew one and lost two and still qualified.

“So there’s still 20 points to play for and we’re on six, but we have to learn the lesson because we definitely, with the atmosphere and intensity of the crowd, it definitely affected some of our decisionmaking under pressure and we need to be better at that.

“I think the key things we talked about were the first 20 and the last 20.

Intense

“You know, when you go to France, and I think Clermont told us this in the semi-final, when you go to those high intense French atmospheres, you need to start well and you need to take the energy out of the crowd and I think we did the opposite. We gave them three points, six points.

“They played well, no doubt they were one of the best teams we played against in terms of the uniqueness of how they played, they did the homework and key ball players played very well.

“But it was disappointing to give them that 14-point start, we then fight hard to get to 27-21 with 60 minutes gone, to then throw an intercept and one or two what I would call mental errors, a missed lineout, this, that and the other.”

With Treviso having beaten Leinster last season, the intensity in training this week will have been sky high.

The panic button will by no means be pressed because there is a mutual feeling between the coaches and players that sloppy errors at crucial moments cost them.