Many Leinster fans would yesterday have awoken to the radio advertising campaign promoting the province's season ticket sales. Coming hard on the heels of their latest Guinness Pro12 defeat away to the Dragons, which has virtually ensured Leinster will miss out on the end-of-season play-offs, it has never been a harder sell.
Having secured a top-two finish in each of the last five seasons, thus securing five home semi-finals and with that five finals, and in the process provided nine knockout matches out of ten at the RDS, this Pro12 campaign constitutes quite a fall from grace.
That 34-12 win over Glasgow at a gloriously sunny RDS last May looks like it belongs to a different time zone now. The four tries to nil win was founded on a rock-solid defence and a mixture of utilising Glasgow’s high-risk offloading game with sharp countering and a couple of strike moves. It seemed like a benchmark for the Matt O’Connor era, but last season’s improved defence under his watch has vanished of late.
In actual fact, they were credited with ‘only’ nine missed tackles against the Dragons, which followed 81 missed tackles in the previous three games against the Scarlets, Glasgow and Bath. Yet they still conceded another four tries, and have now conceded 13 tries in their last four games. Accordingly, this season Leinster have been leaking tries at 1.85 per game in the league, up from 1.36 last season.
Most of all though, nothing marks their decline this season as simply their results. Even if they win their last three matches, their win tally will be 12 – three shy of the 2010-11 total, six shy of the following season, and five short of each of the last two seasons. Not since finishing eighth in 2003-04 have Leinster been outside the top three, making this their worst league season in 11 years.
Admittedly, they are still conceding less tries than in the final season under Joe Schmidt, but their try rate in attack has also slipped from 2.86 in Schmidt's last year, to 2.6 last season and now 2.47 this season (which, admittedly also, is still higher than in Schmidt's first two campaigns, not to mention Michael Cheika's last one).
Granted, a bit like following Alex Ferguson at Manchester United, succeeding Joe Schmidt was always going to be a tough act to follow.
Even so, there appears to have been a damaging loss of self-belief. In so many games this season – early on against Munster at home, the two games against the Dragons, the Bath quarter-final, and letting slip a 20-6 lead away to Wasps when seemingly in utter control – their performance has unravelled when things turned against them.
Demanding premium
For a team which has traditionally relied on high-tempo, multi-phase recycling, they have clearly missed Jonno Gibbes’s influence as well. By the end of his fifth and last season with the province, his demanding premium on Leinster’s breakdown work had contributed to their high efficiency there. It’s no coincidence that Clermont Auvergne are now generating the quickest ball in the Top 14, and probably in Europe.
Nor have Leinster's signings been on a par with the kind of recruits which marked their assault on Europe from the Noughties, albeit Kane Douglas has assuredly suffered for being on the rugby treadmill without a break.
There have been signs that Ben Te’o could provide their midfield with an X factor, and whatever about the gamble on Te’o at outside centre, giving him more game time last Sunday made sense. His two tries were vindication for this investment, albeit two of Leinster’s tries were individualistic rather than the product of cohesive teamwork.
A huge leadership void has been left by the departure of so many stellar names, and the loss of Isa Nacewa, especially for his leadership role during the Test windows, has been incalculable. Re-signing him is a gamble, for sure, but one worth taking for the feelgood factor alone it will generate and with the World Cup on the horizon (and it might sell a few more of those tickets).
Stark contrast
In an interview with Matt Cooper on Today FM last Friday, O’Connor said that Leinster’s 18 Irish internationals have played, on average, eight games apiece this season for their province. Yet they have generally been bulk suppliers to Ireland, and their record of one win, two draws and three defeats since early February has been in stark contrast to the same period in recent seasons.
Last year, they won six out of six from the start of February, the year before five out of six, and in the seasons before that their form in and around the Six Nations read 4-1-1, 4-0-1 and 4-0-0. O’Connor and his coaching staff have simply not been extracting the same level of performances from the team when the front-liners have been unavailable.
O'Connor's gamble on resting 12 of the starting XV against Bath for last Sunday's game backfired, and so Leinster must save their season in Marseilles. Ironically, the defeat to the Dragons, and its consequences for their league campaign, will surely provoke a response and a big performance, and unlike the rest of the Pro12, not to mention all but Saracens and the big two in France, they are 80 minutes away from the European Champions Cup final. In stark contrast to the inglorious exits of Ulster and Munster, that would also quieten the dissenters.
If they come back empty-handed from France, the number of disgruntled supporters will grow. Still, were Leinster to seek a successor to O’Connor, the job might not be that attractive – especially next season. “By the way, you probably won’t have your two first-choice frontrows, main ball-winner, a slew of backrowers, a scrumhalf or two, both outhalves and some outside backs for the first two months of the league campaign, and you’ll then have a fortnight to prepare for Europe. Best of luck.”
A bit like those season tickets, it could be a hard sell.
gthornley@irishtimes.com
