HEINEKEN CUP:The Leicester head coach believes the trip to Dublin will be as tough as a trip to France, writes CIARÁN CRONIN

LEICESTER HEAD coach Richard Cockerill believes that his side’s trip to Dublin for this weekend’s Heineken Cup quarter-final date with Leinster is every ounce as difficult as a visit to any of French rugby’s most fervent strongholds.

An aggressive, in-your-face hooker in his playing days, Cockerill made a total of 39 European appearances for Leicester and Montferrand, and has also experienced the parochial nature of French club rugby up close and personal during a two-season sojourn with the latter.

The 40-year-old is, therefore, as well-placed as anybody to judge where precisely a trip to Ireland rates on European rugby’s scale of intimidation.

“I certainly think it’s on par (with a trip to France),” he said at the club’s training ground yesterday, as the Tigers fine-tuned their preparations for this weekend.

“The Irish sides on their own ground are tough. You know what they’re going to bring. You know they’re going to be tough, you know they’re going to be physical and up for the battle. That’s no different to going anywhere in France against the big sides. We’re under no illusions of how hard it’s going to be, or how physical or frantic it’s going to be.

“But you want to see as a club whether you have the mettle to go to these places and actually win. And if you’re going to win Europe, you’ve got to go to these places and win.

“We’d have preferred to be at home for obvious reasons but we only have ourselves to blame for not topping our group. Leinster have qualified out of a very tough group so clearly they’ve been on top form, but we know that when we get it right, we’re very difficult to beat too.”

Cockerill isn’t exaggerating on that last point. The Tigers are sitting rather pretty atop the Aviva Premiership table at the moment, three points clear of Saracens, having scored an impressive 54 tries in their 19 fixtures. The game might have changed in recent years but Leicester haven’t. They still possess a solid set-piece, a ball-carrying backrow, clever half-backs and a handful of destructive runners out wide. As a result, they remain an effective and dangerous unit, although Cockerill is not blind to his side’s flaws.

“We’ve got to work harder in defence, we’ve got to get into positions earlier and we’ve got to make our shots,” he said on the back of a couple of dubious defensive performances in recent weeks against Bath and Harlequins. “In the last two weeks we’ve been fortunate not to concede tries in the early parts of the game. If we do that at the Aviva we could find ourselves in the mire.”

Cockerill’s last forensic analysis of Leinster came in advance of the 2009 Heineken Cup final at Murrayfield but the Leicester coach feels that now, under new management, the province aren’t all that dissimilar to his own side in that they like to keep the ball in hand and utilise the talent in their backrow and backline to the maximum.

“I think Joe Schmidt has encouraged them to play a little bit more,” he said, continuing his clear desire to only speak in flattering terms about Leinster in advance of Saturday’s game. “You can see that they like to offload and play out of the tackle and do all those things. Shane Jennings and Leo Cullen took the best bits from here and that’s helped them culturally and the way they approach the game as well. They’re a good side, I have a lot of respect for them.”

With regards his own players, in particular the international quintet of Toby Flood, Ben Youngs, Louis Deacon, Tom Croft and Dan Cole, who were part of the England side felled at the Aviva Stadium three weekends back, Cockerill can only see positives from what must have been a harrowing experience. “Was that game psychologically damaging to Ben Youngs and all those guys? I don’t know. It’s a different team, different attitude and different scenario. I don’t think it’s going to have an effect on the way Ben, Toby or the others will play. Human nature would dictate that they’ll want to go to Dublin and prove that they can play and do a good job.

“Hopefully they will have learned from that experience and they’ll know what it’s like. They’re not going to get caught cold by the physicality or the atmosphere or the way the stadium is. Hopefully that can only be of benefit to us.”