Leo Cullen is no daw. By using his post-Toulon press conference to spray several tankers’ worth of ordure at the gathered press oiks, he had to know fine well what the result would be. Just as no sports coach in the world has ever lost face sticking it to the media, very few groups take the bait as readily as a bunch of sports hacks scorned.
As sure as night followed day, it meant a week of columns, podcasts, tweets and posts about Leo versus The Boot Boys/Girls in the press. The fact that Leinster came so bum-squeakingly close to throwing away an 18-point lead in the last 11 minutes of a European semi-final got a little lost in the mix. If we didn’t know better, we’d wonder if that wasn’t the point of the exercise all along.
Certainly, if you talked to anyone involved in literally any other sport on the island this week, the notion of Leinster Rugby getting a hard time from the sports media was met with peals of laughter. The Cork hurlers had to plough through months of commentary on a viral text message that invented a half-time row in an All-Ireland final – and the gilded princes of Leinster rugby think they have it bad? Boo-effing-hoo!
The whole thing made Cullen look a bit silly, really. There was something very Princess And The Pea about it all, as though it doesn’t sit right with the Leinster head coach that the hosannas that are habitually sung for his team suddenly go silent as soon as they get beaten in another big game. But he knows better than anyone what top-level sport means. It’s like Brad Pitt says in the Moneyball movie: “If you lose the last game of the season, nobody gives a s**t.”
Cullen picked some oddly specific bugbears to support his point. Unbidden, he brought up a couple of incidents at the end of last year’s Champions Cup semi-final against Northampton. ”We were sitting in this room this time last year. We were in that situation and we were throwing everything at Northampton. [Henry] Pollock gets a poach – it should have been a penalty. It’s clearly illegal, but nobody wants to report about it after.
“We should have had a penalty try and nobody wants to report about it. You just want to kick the boot into us, don’t you? But that’s the way it goes.”
Apart from sounding a little sour about a game that was a full year in the rearview mirror, Cullen was also completely incorrect. This is from Gerry Thornley’s report on the game: “Then, under the nose of referee Pierre Brousset and under the posts, Pollock didn’t release after tackling [Joe] McCarthy, and planted a hand on the ground, when Leinster would surely have taken the three points and extra-time.” Rúaidhrí O’Connor in the Sindo: “Referee Pierre Brousset ignored Henry Pollock going off his feet and waved play on as Alex Coles capitalised to win a turnover.”
As for the possible penalty try, pretty much every report or analysis piece in the days that followed highlighted it. Owen Doyle gave nearly half of his refereeing column to it on the Tuesday. It was headlined, “The laws are clear – Leinster should have had a penalty try". Donal Lenihan and Brendan O’Brien both called it out in The Examiner. Murray Kinsella broke both incidents down frame-by-frame in The 42.
Nobody wants to report about it? They have a funny way of showing it. The media just wants to kick the boot into Leinster? Ah here. The games happen, the results come down, the press does its best to explain and illuminate what went on. Since the dawn of time, a coach crying about media agendas is usually a pretty decent tell that they know they’ve messed up themselves somewhere along the way.
And funny enough, the deal with the Leinster gig is always disgustingly straightforward. They are the biggest province in Irish rugby, the one with the most money and the biggest grassroots base feeding into their future success. Rightly or wrongly, the public expects them to win. When they don’t, it’s a big deal.
Now, that probably doesn’t feel very fair when you’re on the inside looking out but it surely can’t come as a surprise. Certainly not to someone as intelligent and as steeped in the history of the club as Leo Cullen. He left Jordie Barrett, Jack Conan and Andrew Porter on the bench against Northampton – and he’s still cranky 12 months later about a couple of refereeing calls? Come on.
Here’s the thing. Nobody expects Leinster to win the Champions Cup every year. It might well feel like that in the white heat of the effort to do it, but that’s just not the reality. Everyone understands that an Irish team being champions of Europe, even one as well-resourced as Leinster, is something that still carries the whiff of an underdog story about it. The bookies have Bordeaux as seven-point favourites in the final. It will be a monumental result if Leinster pull it off.
But it’s equally true that when Leinster lost to Northampton last year, it had been four years since they last won the URC. Whatever about tripping up in sight of the summit in Europe, they hadn’t so much as made the final of the competition in which they are the genuine big dogs since 2021. Any assessment that balanced reasonable expectation against results was obviously going to be unfavourable at that point.
Since then, they’ve knocked off their ninth URC title, are well-placed in pursuit of their 10th and are into another Champions Cup final. It could be a season of seasons. Or it could be another washout.
Either way, what the press say about it won’t change a thing.
