SEXTON PRIDE IN HIS CHAMPS

COOL CUSTOMER Johnny Sexton displays how cold it was at RDS last and, below, Ulster No.8 Marcell Coetzee is tackled by James Tracy and Josh van der Flier of Leinster

LEINSTER skipper Johnny Sexton praised his side’s second half comeback and admitted: “It’s in our hands now.”

Victory for Ulster would have almost certainly earned them a place in the PRO14 final at the champions’ expense.

But instead a bonus point Blues win makes them favourites for the March decider from Conference A.

“It’s in our hands now, there’s still a lot of work to do but that’s all you can ask for,” said

Sexton. “We’re going to lose a lot of players to the international window and then the rest of the squad are going to have to pick it up.

“It’s always been a squad effort in this club for those reasons and it’s no different now.

“We needed to get a game together, for me I haven’t played for Leinster for a long time apart from 20 minutes last week so it’s about getting that continuity.

“You could see we were very rusty, especially in the first half and I was very proud of how we gathered ourselves at half-time and had a very good second half performance.”

Ulster coach Dan Mcfarland was “really disappointed” to leave without even a bonus point.

He added: “We came down with a side that we thought would put in a really good performance and certainly for the first half we did.

“We were against a Leinster that was more or less fully loaded, very strong. At half-time, we put ourselves into a good position with some smart and strong play.

“Then at the start of the second half we made two errors. That was really the flipping of the game.”