By Johnny Watterson
There is little sweet talk from Robin McBryde.
“We weren’t good enough,” says the former Welsh hooker. McBryde, who joined Leinster from Wales after the 2019 Rugby World Cup, refuses to look for excuses as Leinster face Glasgow on Saturday for their second knockout match in successive weeks.
“We can argue the case that we should have had this or that. But at the end of the day, we weren’t quite good enough and that’s why we lost the game,” he said, with the frustrating taste of last week’s final defeat to La Rochelle still lingering.
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“We put ourselves in situations that we should never have been in. We gave it a good crack. But we weren’t at our best really. Listen, you just have to give La Rochelle the plaudits. They came with a game plan, they executed it and they snuck it at the end.
“At the end of day, it doesn’t matter how you win a final, as long as you win. If it’s seven penalties, then it’s seven penalties. The nature of it, with regards to, should we have gone for the corner? Should we have done this that and the other, it’s easy to say in hindsight, isn’t it? But you’ve just got to back the decisions that the players are making. You keep the scoreboard ticking over, you build pressure on the scoreboard.”
For obvious reasons there has been some haste in wanting to leave the Marseille conversation in last week. McBryde agrees, although, maybe the scrum is in need of some attention. There is no sense of panic even if the suspicion lingers that teams have decided to target the Leinster scrum. There is also, he infers, a certain amount of reading the nuances of referees and how they interpret the set piece.
That, he believes, it is an issue for the coaches to problem-solve and not the players. As in every match of every week, the best he can take from a tough defeat apart from hurt is something from the match that can be used to strengthen the team for Glasgow this week.
“It’s not the players, it’s my issue,” he says. “I have to make sure that I do my work a bit better. So, listen, we are pursuing the channels with regard to getting feedback from the pictures that the referees see on the day. It’s an ongoing process really, but ultimately, we know that teams are going to attack us in a certain way and we’ve got to be prepared for it.
“We can’t rely on the referee to give us the call on every single occasion, irrespective if you agree or disagree with him. I need to do my work a bit better there. We went through a painful process in the meetings about some of the lessons, some of the learnings we can take from the game.”
He agrees the Glasgow game’s importance has inflated to beyond the size it was two weeks ago. Losing both seasonal goals, the European Champions Cup and United Rugby Championship in the space of seven days would be an unwanted crash-landing for Leinster. The promise and optimism of the previous nine months vanishing in such a short window brings its own anxieties.
“Yeah. I think it does,” he says. “You want to have something to show for the fruits of your labour. The number of staff members that made it out to Marseille, the non-playing members of the squad were all there at the end of the game as well, so there’s a huge commitment from everybody, supporters alike as well, so there’s a sense of guilt, you know?
“So we’ve got to show that respect really in preparing the best way possible in order to give us the best opportunity to win on Saturday. There are no guarantees, Glasgow will have been preparing for two weeks, they’re a good outfit. They only narrowly lost to La Rochelle themselves so they’ll have a plan put in place for us, so it’s going to be tough for us. It is going to be tough. This game now is a little bit bigger possibly than what it was two weeks ago.”
Absolutely no doubt about that.
