AFTER-MATCH QUOTES:FOR ALL but the champions there is only one way a Heineken Cup campaign can end, and, as is his wont, Michael Cheika took the bitter experience of his 38th and last European Cup game with Leinster on the chin and analysed it as honestly as he could.

“Maybe once upon a time that would have been considered a good effort,” he said, but last year’s triumph had set the bar higher. “We had a few injuries as well. (Shane) Jennings was on one leg from late in the first half; (Jamie) Heaslip was in trouble; (Kevin) McLoughlin was in trouble for a while and that was all coming in the same position.

“So physically I thought we got stuck in and matched it with them. We were good at the defensive maul, we were good in the ruck area, but I thought we were penalised a bit too much. We had opportunities through field phase to attack their defence with our play (but) when we started to set up, we either dropped the ball on the carry – that would have happened maybe three or four times – or we didn’t attack a softer defence, we tried to go around it.

“When you add those up there’s probably half a dozen opportunities there. If you take one more, all of a sudden you’re only behind by three, and not by 10.”

Toulouse have superior impact off the bench to most teams, Cheika admitted, and this was compounded by Leinster’s absentee list. The unusual “miscommunication in defence” for David Skrela’s try he attributed to “giving too much ball away and having to defend, because it doesn’t happen very often we would get breached in the middle of our defensive line”.

Brian O’Driscoll maintained that chasing two trophies was “absolutely no factor whatsoever. Today was about one game, and a team that took their opportunities and a team that didn’t. On another day we could have taken those and it might have been tighter at the death. We could be talking about being in a final and being in a semi-final of another competition (Magners). But that’s not the case so we’ll have to make do with trying to win a Magners League this season.”

Lamenting the scrum problems which limited their opportunity to attack off first-phase ball, O’Driscoll said: “You do need a quality platform to set up your first-phase possession. We’ve always been a side, in Leinster and also with the national team, about attacking off first phase, not just looking to set up and try to get into subsequent phases.

“A lot of the time I’ve found first phase is the ball to attack off. But we didn’t quite get the platform for whatever reason, whether it be struggling at the set-piece or the referee’s decision, I don’t know.

“The disappointment from an outside back’s point of view is that you want to be able to attack with your best skills set and perhaps we weren’t quite able to do that and give it a proper go, but we win and lose as a team and we made a couple of bad errors ourselves in defence. We made some bad decisions that didn’t help our pack out so you have to accept it as a side.”

Asked if he was proud, in typically straightforward fashion Toulouse coach Guy Noves observed: “A banal question to ask, of course I am. We’re very, very happy. It was very hard out there. The scenario of the game was a bit difficult. We controlled the game for about 30 minutes then the game seemed to slip away from us. It showed our capacity to react in the second half when we came good. The first 30 minutes was good, and the second half. So of course I’m proud. It is immense, a sixth final for Toulouse.”

Their captain and human wrecking ball, Thierry Dusautoir, admitted Leinster’s try had been a wake-up call, adding: “We adapted to the conditions but so did the Irish. Both teams tried to play some rugby, it was a great spectacle out there today. We were more efficient and so we won. We played the match we needed to play against the champions of Europe. The tight five did their job today and had a great performance.”

In a delivery that’s as rapid fire as his service, Byron Kelleher also hailed his pack’s performance.

“We were patient, we played the ball in their territory in the second half and we had a grand scrum and we gained nine points out of it. Everyone knows your tight five are the ones that set the platform so we drummed it into our tight five this week to make sure that they did the job and they did, they responded. But I think the best thing was how pleasing our defence was, we didn’t slip off too many tackles, we shut down their threats so we’re pretty stoked with that.”