In the decade between 2012 and 2021, Mayo reached six All-Ireland football finals and lost them all – three of them by a single point and one of those after a replay. Including the draw in 2016, their average losing margin in seven finals was less than 2.5 points. Some people apparently regard them as chokers, which is a joke really.
As John Barclay said on Premier Sports last Saturday, losing a semi-final is possibly preferable to doing so in a final. In truth, for that Mayo team to keep picking themselves up off the canvas after each bitter disappointment in order to start all over again in pursuit of their holy grail shows incredible strength of character. It would be so much easier to give up and walk away.
Three of their six losses were against Jim Gavin’s six-in-a-row side, widely considered to be the best Gaelic football team of all time. Nobody pushed that Dubs side harder than Mayo. No other county came close. Yet they received nothing like the same scrutiny. By comparison, they were all given a free pass.
Yes, you can see where this is going. At the recent Rugby Players of Ireland awards ceremony, Andrew Trimble, in his inimitably laconic way, asked Mayo native Caelan Doris if he had passed on the curse. To which Doris replied he has actually won at Croke Park.
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Perhaps there is a slight irony in Doris, Jack Conan and Cian Healy finally lifting Leinster’s first trophy in four seasons there last Saturday after an emphatic 32-7 win over the Bulls. Again, though, some jokers still regard this Leinster side as chokers.
This is because, since their 2021 Pro14 success behind closed doors, Leinster had lost three successive Champions Cup finals against La Rochelle, in Marseille and Dublin, and Toulouse, in London. In May, they added a Champions Cup semi-final defeat to Northampton at home.
The province had also lost three successive URC semi-finals. The margins in those seven defeats were: three points, one, nine (having finished level after 80 minutes), three, one, one and five. In every one, the game was in the balance until the last play of the 80 minutes.
Leinster certainly haven’t been awash with luck. They’d have won the 2022 Champions Cup final in Marseille but for Wayne Barnes penalising Ross Molony in the jackal on the premise that Michael Alaalatoa hadn’t rolled away. No amount of replays will convince Molony or this columnist that the Leinster prop hadn’t sufficiently manoeuvred himself out of the way.
One final where the “choker” tag might have some validation is the 27-26 loss to La Rochelle in 2023. Leinster had led by 17-0 and then 23-7, but they didn’t score a point after the 46th minute. That statistic and zero second-half passes between the entire backline outside Ross Byrne was evidence of how they stopped playing.
Still, that was Ronan O’Gara’s La Rochelle team at their irresistible best. They deserved credit for the comeback, which had shades of Leinster’s fightback in the 2011 decider against Northampton.
In the pulsating 2024 final at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, Leinster came within a whisker of sealing a win in the 80th minute via Ciarán Frawley’s drop goal attempt. He nailed two against the Springboks in Durban a few weeks later.
Again, they received hardly any of the 50-50 calls from Matthew Carley, most notably when identical offences by Anthony Jelonch and James Lowe – in slapping the ball over the touchline – received contrasting punishments.
Toulouse were widely acclaimed as the best French club side ever, with the sport’s greatest player as their captain and talisman. Further putting that epic 2024 final in London into perspective, five weeks later Toulouse beat Bordeaux Bègles by 59-3 at the Stade de France, a record winning margin for a final in the history of the French Championship.
Only one other team has reached three successive Champions Cup finals but, naturally, Leinster receive little or no credit for that, or for much else.
In the last four seasons they’ve won 91 matches, drawn one and lost 20. In the Champions Cup they’ve won 27 out of 31 games. They’ve put 40 on Toulouse (twice) and La Rochelle, whom they’ve also beaten twice in a row away. They’ve entertained royally, played some thrilling rugby and scored oodles of great tries.
In the aftermath of Saturday’s final, head coach Leo Cullen – who might well have considered stepping down had Leinster not won – wondered aloud as to what constitutes success or failure. The line between them is not so blurred anymore, and in Leinster’s case it is seemingly judged solely by whether they win the Champions Cup or not.
Hence, the one that got away is this year’s defeat against Northampton, one of only two semi-final losses suffered by home sides in the last decade.
As Tommy O’Brien admitted – although Ryan Baird refutes the theory utterly – Leinster were “flat” in their ensuing games but rediscovered their buzz in the last fortnight when convincingly dethroning the champions and then their nearest challengers, who beat them in last season’s semi-finals.
That still doesn’t completely ease the pain from that Northampton defeat, which has been deemed a non-show but was perhaps more accurately a delayed show in what was one of the games of the season. It must still bemuse Leinster as much as us, and in the absence of a Antoine Dupont-less Toulouse, is compounded by Bordeaux Bègles awaiting in a Cardiff final and thoughts of what might have been.
Ultimately, though, Leinster won one of only two trophies on offer and reached the semi-final of the other. They also won 25 of 28 matches. They earned a half-dozen home play-off ties to further swell the coffers. They provided a record dozen Lions. Season ticket holders are up to 15,000 ahead of returning to an expanded RDS.
With any other club, region or province, that would be considered a successful season. Anyone other than Leinster.
The URC has never been harder to win and yet no team has ever been more deserving champions. Maybe it’s time they cut themselves a little slack. And maybe it’s time we did too.
