THE TEAMS drew the crowd. The crowd made the game. The boot of Jonathan Sexton clinched the match. A testy, unattractive meeting in rugby’s finest drawing room and once more two decorated sides made the contest greater than the dimensions of what was, in isolation, an early season league clash.

Before a ball was kicked, Brian O’Driscoll, perhaps with the words of Alex Ferguson ringing in his ears from a Thursday soiree, stalked smartly around the infield, a stinger keeping him out, but assuming the part of team mentor, touchstone, icon.

As ever there was more at stake here than league points or indeed pretty rugby. Like family disputes everywhere, the contest carried the freight of a shared history, each team knowing the pressure points, the emotional frailties. There Leinster won out.

“Yeah a bit hairy at the end,” said coach Joe Schmidt of the 24-19 score. “An ugly derby game of rugby. Quite good endeavour there but it was difficult to play rugby tonight. It was a really frustrating night.

“It’s not the way we want to play necessarily. It was a penalty fest. We prefer to play rugby in a positive way. With the second highest crowd attendance in the league it’s not the way we would have liked it . . . a penalty fest.”

Keith Earls’ hobbling departure for a scan on his knee ligaments might have brought the crowd down a notch, especially with next week’s Heineken Cup in mind.

But five minutes in when the throats had cleared, Cian Healy charged into Ronan O’Gara. From thereafter the crowd of 48,365 bore witness to Leinster pushing the Munster scrum backwards and Sexton allaying the anxieties of thousands by landing his first penalty. Was that really a plaintive cry of Hallelujah from the East Stand?

It remained that way as the scoreboard beat a quick step pattern of O’Gara, Sexton, Sexton, O’Gara, Sexton, Sexton before staccato broke in, O’Gara, Sexton, O’Gara, Sexton . . . and in between a fractious battle at the breakdown keeping the tension bubbling along to half time, Leinster leading 15-9.

“I was unhappy with the way we finished, very disappointing,” said Paul O’Connell. “Obviously the amount of penalties we gave away . . . we’ll have to look at our discipline. We just conceded momentum. It’s very hard when you give away penalties like that. That was frustrating for us.”

Fine margins and fussy refereeing and the crowd begged for a cavalier try. But it wasn’t that type of night, Rob Kearney dropping a goal for 21-12 as Sexton shaped things in his own understated way.

O’Gara missing his first kick and the substituted Donncha O’Callaghan grinding out a few more kilometres on the sideline bike told its own story; Munster coming up short on the day.

“It was a pretty slow motion game,” added Schmidt. “I’ve never seen a Munster, Leinster game, where Leinster has won and you see a pretty deflated dressing room, where the guys feel like they’re tired but they haven’t really played a quality game of rugby.”

Then a twist. The moustachioed Jamie Heaslip drew a yellow card for on the ground black arts and slopped off stage like a pantomime villain offering Munster a 10-minute lifeline.

But too late in this dog fight.