Okay, let’s be big about this, for a moment anyway, and see the bigger picture. That was a belter of a semi-final weekend in the Champions Cup, one of the very best the tournament has provided. And the tournament needed it as well.
Casting aside the huge disappointment of Leinster coming up so agonisingly short, Northampton’s 37-34 win at the Aviva Stadium on Saturday felt like one of the best semi-finals for years.
Coupled with Bordeaux-Bègles also upsetting the odds, if not to the same extent, in a full-on, heavyweight battle with Toulouse at a sold-out Matmut Atlantique, it’s hard to recall when semi-final weekend last had such entertainment and a real sense of occasion at both games.
Where do Leinster go next after more Champions Cup heartache?
At a time when interest in the Champions Cup is palpably waning across the pond, and in a season when three-time winners Saracens unapologetically prioritised “The Prem”, it’s possibly no harm that Northampton are the first English club to reach the final since 2020.
The Counter Ruck: the rugby newsletter from The Irish Times
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Where do Leinster go next after more Champions Cup heartache?
Saturday’s thrilling game at the Aviva Stadium deserved a capacity crowd. The semi-finals fall under the auspices of European Professional Club Rugby (EPRC) and they can use phrases such as “in conjunction with” and “in collaboration” all they like, but ultimately the 10,000 empty seats at the Aviva is down to them getting their pricing and ticketing strategy wrong.
No doubt EPCR will still bask in the reflected glory of such a weekend although they also messed up the offer or a renewed deal with TNT before the season started and settled for less money from Premier Sports, with no games on terrestrial television in the UK, or from next season in Ireland.
The pity is, therefore, that the tournament has such little reach in the UK, albeit the English wing of Premier Sports and beinSports, as well as the Anglo-French duopoly which created and controls EPCR, will welcome an English-French final, the first since 2020 when Exeter Chiefs beat Racing 92 behind closed doors. All is right with the world again.
Northampton are in their third final, having won the 2000 decider against Munster at Twickenham and lost to Leinster in 2011, while Bordeaux-Bègles have never won a major trophy and are in their first final.
Hence, host Cardiff’s eighth final has a certain novelty value compared to a reprise of last year’s brilliant final between Toulouse and Leinster. The prospect of Toulouse and Leinster each reaching their ninth final had perhaps made some commentators and pundits, especially across the water, a little weary. For this would also have followed the back-to-back finals between La Rochelle and Leinster. Yet before the 2023 decider in the Aviva, repeat finals had never happened before.
However, the tournament’s 30th semi-final weekend was yet another reminder of how difficult it is to reach finals, even for the tournament’s two most successful sides. In 17 semi-finals, even the mighty Toulouse, the ultimate serial winners with six European stars who’ve also won the Bouclier de Brennus trophy a record 23 times, have an 8-9 win-loss record.
Leinster, four-time European Champions who also have won the Challenge Cup and iterations of what is now the URC more times (eight) than anyone else, have now won eight and lost eight of their 16 semi-finals. Nobody is entitled to anything, least of all winners’ medals.
That said, Leinster’s loss is the more acute of the two. Not alone did Toulouse have the more damaging injury profile, but they were away from home. In the seven years since Munster were beaten 26-10 by Saracens in the Aviva Stadium in 2017, only once in 14 semi-finals had an away side prevailed, namely when La Rochelle beat Racing 92 in 2022 by 20-13 in Lens; more of a neutral venue than home for the Parisians. Leinster are thus only the second home side in the last 16 semi-finals to lose with “home country” advantage.
In what will be another painful postmortem, to rival that of the 2023 final when Leinster let slip a 23-7 lead against La Rochelle, the debates will rage among supporters on a variety of topics in the search for fail-safe answers − of which there are very few, if any. But there’s no doubt the coaching staff also have to look at their own performance in advance of this game.
It’s always a difficult balancing act at this stage of the season, but, whereas Northampton’s Phil Dowson fielded his match-hardened side a week previously, Leinster were again wrapped in cotton wool. For many Irish frontliners, this was their third game in seven weeks since the Six Nations, the previous two having been 62-0 and 52-0 wins, and whereas Leinster hunted like voracious hounds from the off in defence in the last two rounds, that wasn’t the case against Northampton.
Now it’s worth noting that Leo Cullen and co employed a similar selection policy which had resulted in Leinster reaching three successive Champions Cup finals, with their greater freshness and sharpness cited as contributory factors in the 40-17 and 41-22 semi-final wins over Toulouse three and two seasons ago respectively.
Hindsight is 20-20 vision, but stacking an all-international bench comprising 358 Test caps with Andrew Porter, Jack Conan and Jordie Barrett now looks like a gamble that backfired, and may well have contributed to that off-colour, disconnected defensive performance, especially in the first-half.
While there were pluses, notably Tommy O’Brien, and many good displays, for whatever reason the coaches certainly didn’t have the team as well primed from the off as in the previous two rounds. But, either way, that selection looked like Cullen and co’s biggest mistake.
This defeat will also fuel the view that Leinster can only lead from the front and by extension are flat-track bullies, and that, à la Ireland, they cannot win tight matches. Perhaps the last three finals contributed to the lack of composure and jittery nature of Leinster’s performance which Cullen noted. But Leinster did recover from a bad start to lead 15-10, and it was then that they lost their way.
Besides, they don’t just get handed home semi-finals, they earn them. In some ways they’re damned if they do win well and damned if they don’t. Leinster were behind early on against Toulouse two seasons ago. And as well as hanging tough in a pool win at home to Clermont this season, what about the 16-14 win in La Rochelle last January and the 16-9 win in the pouring rain a year previously?
Furthermore, in each of the last three finals and last Saturday they’ve been one play away from winning. But, of course, this may have left them scarred mentally. They are human after all.
