Sense of unfinished business driving James Lowe on

James Lowe is squatting against the post at the Hill 16 end of Croke Park, while his team-mates kick balls towards, at or over him.

At the halfway line the Champions Cup trophy stands with trailing ribbons on a tall plinth to the side of the pitch. All the Leinster players would have passed it by on their way out of the locker room under the Hogan Stand.

A few yards from the trophy, GAA president Jarlath Burns looks on, smiles for a picture and gathers people around looking on to the pitch like a dutiful host making sure his guests are comfortable.

Declan Darcy slips past. A Dublin and Leitrim footballer and now a performance coach with Leinster Rugby, he is perhaps the only one who finds familiarity with the terraced seating and steeply rising stands that appear to arch over at the top and glower down.

The Counter Ruck: the rugby newsletter from The Irish Times

---

What has David Nucifora ever done for Irish rugby?

---

Munster move to the URC summit after narrow Edinburgh win

---

Gerry Thornley: Giving the Aviva Stadium to Uefa for five weeks is patently ridiculous

---

Lowe shakes his head and laughs. If there is a set mood for the Leinster winger on which most people would agree, laughing and reducing tension could be it. It doesn’t make him a less serious player or take him further from the centre of Leinster’s plans for Northampton on Saturday.

The team will look to Lowe as they always do, to hit rucks, clean players out, make defensive tackles and score tries like he did twice against La Rochelle in the quarter-final.

Lowe also understands why Croke Park is seen by Irish people as more than a patch of green space off Jones’ Road; its connection with the past and its historical place in Ireland’s troubled past. Where he grew up in New Zealand, there is no such place .

“No, I wouldn’t say that there would be anything of this sort of historical significance, no,” he says.

“I mean, I think everyone understands the history of what Croke Park represents to the Irish people and I’m sure there’s kids all around the country who dream of one day being able to represent their provinces here and their counties.

“Ireland has been my home for a pretty long time now. I’ve been here for watching a few football matches and to get the opportunity to play a game of rugby here, only the second club rugby match to ever be played here, it’s pretty special and an absolute privilege and tomorrow’s going to be one heck of a day. So, look, I’m well aware of what happened here.”

Lowe also knows because Darcy told him so, that Croke Park magnifies everything. It supersizes performance: if it’s a bad performance it is crushing and if it’s a good performance you soar.

Six years ago was Leinster’s last Champions Cup win in San Mames Stadium in Bilbao. Lowe didn’t play in that final against Racing 92, although he celebrated afterwards as if he had. He also spoke well about how not playing in the final didn’t affect his enjoyment of the win.

It seemed then in the heady atmosphere of victory that Leinster were in a groove that would make Champions Cup finals a regularity, with wins naturally following.

Since then, finals did arrive. They have been commonplace. Against Saracens the following year and against La Rochelle twice, in 2022 and 2023. Heartbreak replaced celebration and losing in the final game became an unwanted, repeating Leinster narrative.

He has played in three finals and lost in all three. Last month before they played against Leicester Tigers, Lowe called it a “pretty s**t stat to have”.

All of that has now been baked into the motivational cake to get past Northampton. That first and the players can then face their fears of and the possibility of losing another.

“That was a cracker of a day in Bilbao,” says Lowe. “We were in a bakery at nine o’clock in the morning and we weren’t having croissants.

“Probably took it for granted, I’m not going to lie. I didn’t play in that Bilbao game but the training week, the prep leading up to it. I remember that so well and the boys performed so well on the day and were able to get over the line.

“Look, we have been trying ever since then and we have put ourselves in a very good position now to give ourselves another crack at that. Yeah, it’s a sick obsession. It’s heartbreaking. Every single year you try so hard and on the day it’s been so cruel to us for so many years. But we’ll keep going after it, and please God . . . we will keep knocking on the door and one day it will open.”

Lowe along with Dan Sheehan, Caelan Doris and Jamison Gibson-Park are among the nominations for the Investec Player of the Year. Northampton have two including Courtney Lawes and Fin Smith, with Antoine Dupont and Marcus Smith making up the final eight players.

As well as his two tries against La Rochelle, Lowe also had two assists. When coach Leo Cullen spoke about him after the captain’s run on Friday, he spoke of Lowe’s pedigree and his rugby IP, or intellectual property.

At school he was coached by Andrew Goodman, who will move from Leinster to Ireland at the end of the season until 2027 as backs coach.

Dave Rennie, who won world titles with New Zealand under-20 teams and former All Blacks coach Wayne Smith were also part of the Chiefs’ coaching group when he was there.

His different viewpoint, says Cullen, was one of the things that Leinster look for when they bring in players from overseas, as well as his playing ability, his strength, his huge left boot and attacking instincts. He also described Lowe as “one of the best attacking players probably in the game, in the northern hemisphere anyway”.

He’ll bank any praise but wear it lightly. The s**t stat right now is the thing that constantly reminds him of the capricious nature of the game and its temperamental side. In the final defeats to La Rochelle, just three points each time separated the teams at the end of the match.

“It’s funny, it’s such a fickle game because we’re talking how many points in those last two finals?” he says.

“If something else had happened, if a call had gone a different way, if we’d been given a pen at a different time or the interpretation of a ref [was different] we wouldn’t be talking about it, you know. It’s the same throughout all the tight matches. We can sit here and argue about every point, but we’re obsessed, like you said, and come tomorrow it’s all hands on deck.

“If you look at their set-piece, there is a lot of balls off the top. There is a lot of trick plays, where the hookers are coming around to play the ball to try and get into space. They attack edge to edge. They are making half-breaks, line-breaks the whole time.

“So, we need to be across absolutely everything. They are physical in contact as well, so we know not to not to miss tackles. I mean fingers crossed I don’t have to make too many tackles because that will be a good day at the office.

“But the likelihood is that’s not going to happen and we are going to have to put our heads in a dark place. But it is a credit to them and how they attack and play the game and I think they said earlier they do want to play rugby when they come here. It is teed up for a good spectacle.”

Outside the wind is still but higher up it is blowing. Croke Park’s microclimate with its swirls and vortices eddying around and around, dark and cavernous at one end and light spilling in from the Hill 16 and Clonliffe Road at the other. And then there are the ghosts.

For Lowe, his job is not to see or fear the stadium’s foreboding size or its painful history. Those things that make the ground an almost sacred piece of earth are the very things he must remove. Croke Park may magnify the occasion but he knows the dangers of over thinking it and the strength of letting the majesty of the event just wash over him.

“It’s a funny one,” says Lowe. “Very windy in there but look, every ground has their little quirks and perks. Coming here, it’s magnificent, when you stand in the middle of that pitch and look around, the sheer scale and size of it can be quite overwhelming.

“It is the first time I’ve been on this road, first time I’ve been on the pitch and it’s for the captain’s run. It is an amazing stadium, something that little boys and girls dream about. The fact that we get to play a game of rugby, a game of club rugby in there and the opportunity to fill it out . . .

“Look, we’ve been here before. We’ve been in some pretty big arenas away from here. It’s just that this one is in our back yard.”

Just another day.

• Sign up for push alerts and have the best news, analysis and comment delivered directly to your phone
• Find The Irish Times on WhatsApp and stay up to date
• Listen to our Inside Politics podcast for the best political chat and analysis