Tough to see who can halt Leinster juggernaut now
BEN YOUNGS, the Leicester scrum-half, had said before the game that it would take a performance worthy of the international arena for Leicester to win. ‘It’s going to have that Test match feel to it, that’s what it’s going to take. I think anything short of that build-up is not going to be enough,’ he said.
Youngs is an understated stalwart of the English game, a Test star since the age of 20 and now, at the age of 32, with 117 caps for England. This includes playing in three World Cups, and starting the 2019 final.
He is revered at Leicester, too, a world-class figure who stuck with the club through their darkest times.
Youngs has seen plenty, and he had seen enough of Leinster to know that it would take an extraordinary effort for his team to win this game.
Sportspeople are supposed to achieve a level of focus that banishes any scintilla of doubt, but you’d wonder how a man as experienced as Youngs thought his team could upset Leinster in this quarter-final.
He played the final half-hour in Twickenham when England – down to 14 men for nearly the entire game – almost shocked Ireland in the Six Nations.
There wasn’t much evidence of Ireland’s ruthless Test pedigree that day, but the Leinster core on which Ireland rely brought it to the English midlands.
This was, for 40 minutes anyway, the Leinster standard Youngs anticipated. In the opening half, the game was won. In fact that point can be pared back further: the victory was squared off here with little more than a quarter of the contest played.
The Munster legend was being freshly fattened with some retro heartache against French opposition, while Leinster were disabusing Leicester of any romantic notions of their own.
The all-Irish semi-final was denied by a shoot-out in Dublin, but one home element was assured thanks to the Leinster conciseness that brought grunting tries for Josh van der Flier and Robbie Henshaw.
They led 20-0 at the break, and Leicester rallied strongly but they couldn’t have been any more helpless in the second half.
That revived home spirit brought an early try for the veteran Chris Ashton. His presence must have been triggering for Irish fans of a certain age, who still recall his swan-dive celebration.
For a time, Ashton was, the highly concentrated personification of every cliché and prejudice Irish supporters thought about English rugby.
He is now employed with more of a mentoring outlook in mind, but he has been a canny signing by Steve Borthwick and, when he crossed for a try after 46 minutes, Welford Road boomed with noise.
For three quarters of an hour before that, it was boos that sounded regularly from the home support. Well, they had to make some noise. They increased the pressure on the back of Ashton’s score, but a second try only arrived with seconds left.
That failure to breach the Leinster defence should illustrate the less heralded importance of that aspect of the Leinster game.
Their accomplishment on one side of the ball is properly praised, but they are obdurate defensively, which is at least as important to a winning side.
In that aspect of the game, Henshaw, van der Flier and the mighty Caelan Doris stood out. The last two named were also among Ireland’s best Six Nations performers, underscoring the Ben Youngs point about Leicester needing to hit Test levels to win.
They couldn’t, and they didn’t get near the victory as a result. Those expecting Leinster to try and cut loose were confronted, instead, by a team determined to live out the truisms about championship sides.
So all the features expected of a group that know how to win were ticked off. There was the ruthless economy, scoring two tries out of two meaningful attacking sorties.
There was the management of the contest overseen by Jamison Gibson-Park and Johnny Sexton, the former now a figure of enormous importance provincially and nationally.
And there was the refusal to be cowed by the Leicester revival, a sturdy self-belief that withstood an atmosphere that grew fervid and opponents that were desperate to haul their way back.
As midweek drama in another code illustrated, knock-out games need to be won any which way. And once a significant advantage is salted away, it needs to be roped off and protected with the meanness of a Wild West prospector defending his patch.
Win it, forget it, move on.
It’s an unsparing code, but Leinster understand better than most others, including Pep Guardiola.
Toulouse in Dublin will not cow them, and not because Munster ran the French superstars so close.
Rivals don’t unsettle Leinster, because they now maintain a standard that doesn’t tend towards doubt or creeping fears.
The game isn’t a gimme. It will be a stern challenge in a short turnaround, but the prophetic views of Ben Youngs should inform how we assess the game.
Test class will be needed to win it and, while Toulouse can call on that, Leinster are so central to the Ireland side that switching up to that standard is less of an ask.
No one remembers semi-finals, goes the old wisdom. That again, is something Guardiola might have a view on.
But champions don’t tend to recall them. They play them, they win them, forget them and set themselves again. It’s a formula Leinster seem to understand.