O'B Sport

This weeks and last weeks blog was written by Will Slattery, he’s a journalism student in DCU and as you can see from his articles, a big Leinster fan.

Frauds can take many forms. They can appear as flash players, one-trick coaches or style over substance teams. Fraud teams win the games that don’t matter and don’t turn up for the ones that do. At home they play like they never want to leave the field and when away, they keep their suitcases on the sidelines so they can run straight to the airport.

If a team is a fraud it will be discovered during the quarterfinal weekend. Kidney’s Leinster, Deano Richards’ Harlequins and almost every Stade Francais team to enter the tournament have suffered a communal castration when the pressure of knockout rugby dawned on them.

Biarritz is the biggest fraud in operation. It is the crooked car salesman of the tournament. We know they are rotten but somehow we have yet to prove it. They reverse into the knockout stage every year with the aid of handy draws and Italian opponents.

Luckily Leinster’s culture has changed and they will face Leicester with complete confidence. That match six years ago was the perfect storm of a terrible team selection and a gutless team performance that made you wonder if players like O’Driscoll and Horgan would ever win anything. Kidney’s mismanagement of the game- Shane Jennings was lost for two seasons because of it- seems to have been expunged from his record and was every bit as bad as his Grand Slam achievement was good.

Like on that occasion, this Leicester pack has the ability to trouble Leinster. Tom Croft is back to his Lions form and Castrogiovanni will look to torment the Leinster scrum again. Leicester also boast Thomas Waldron, who is being touted in England as “the next Nick Easter”.

Although if anyone knows why England would want a second Nick Easter feel free to let me know.

Northampton and Ulster is an interesting one, in the sense that either side could implode/explode. Northampton could go the way of Richards’ Harlequins, although probably without the JFK style conspiracy. (Was Tom Williams acting alone? Was Dean Richards the second shooter?)

Sky Sports’ inflate the Aviva Premiership sides’ egos to such an extent that they can be unprepared if their opponents stand up to them. Bath and Saracens were both comprehensively outplayed by Irish opposition in the pool stages and they are meant to be two of England’s best sides. Sky portray Northampton prop Tonga’uiha and centre James Downey as wrecking balls, which they are in the sense that they follow forward bursts by slowly moving from side-to-side. The flip side is if Northampton starts well the confident play of Ashton and Foden will make life very difficult for Ulster.

Ulster can be hopeful though. The Ulster mercenaries have been money well spent. They all sound like Danny Archer from “Blood Diamond” and have improved the spine of the side hugely. There is a famous quote from the creator of “The Muppet Show” Jim Henson (who oddly didn’t create Gavin Henson- arguably the biggest fraud in world rugby) which is “You always have to keep believing and keep pretending”

After this weekend it’s doubtful these frauds will be doing either.

Nobody ever talks about six in a row. Back-to-back gets a nice amount of praise. Three in a row is talked about in hushed and reverential tones and if a five in a row is achieved, well there are parades in the street. But six? Not really a big deal, probably because nothing worth mentioning ever got to a sixth.

That is unless you count Lyon’s six straight league championships, which hopefully nobody ever does.

Leinster is aiming to beat Munster for the sixth consecutive time on Saturday. I am aware that winning five games in a row isn’t winning five championships but that also doesn’t make Leinster’s run meaningless. Leinster and Munster are two of the top three sides in the British Isles, along with Leicester, so for Leinster to win the fixture five times in a row is a big deal.

Leinster’s run has altered a key conventional wisdom that made Munster who they are, which is that they have hunger that other sides don’t posses. A belief swirled around the team for years that a team that defeated Munster would be handed swift and clinical retribution in the return fixture. And this was absolutely true.

I remember attending the miracle match in 2003 and watching Gloucester full back Henry Paul, who at the time was a Sonny Bill-like league recruit, go weak in the knees any time a kick was hoisted upon him. The fans behaved particularly Roman that day, with a ferociousness that can only matched by the crowd response during “Winning Streak”, when a contestant is asked would they like to gamble.

Henry Paul, Sebastian Chabal and Danny Cipriani are some of the players who left large chunks of their reputations scattered around the Limerick pitch after being kicked around it for 80 minutes. And who could forget Phil Vickery who got dealt the shit hand of humiliation with two teams, a fact that pleases me hugely.

Unfortunately for Munster, it was they who failed to show up for the return games this season. The lost a game to Ospreys that, had they shown any rugby brains and restraint at ruck-time, they would have won. Against Toulon it was laughable how inept some veterans performed. Donnacha O’Callaghan obviously interpreted show more on field leadership as tackle a Toulon player without the ball while he’s jogging towards the halfway line.

Dennis Leamy ill discipline has killed Munster this season. He can’t help putting his hand in the cookie-jar and he gives away a large number of penalties when the risk far outweighs the reward. I recently heard someone argue that his brightly coloured scrumcap makes it easy for the refs to see him. Well that, and the fact that he is as subtle at the ruck as a tiptoeing elephant. He is the anti-McCaw. If McCaw plays on the edge of the law, Leamy plays on the edge of reality. Some of his infringements are ridiculously blatant.

The return of Paul O’Connell will be huge for Munster. Whatever people say about Paul O’Connell’s handling skills, he is still a top class lineout operator and a tiresome worker, and you must bear in mind that he has only started one of those previous five Leinster defeats.