Ulster Rugby vs Leinster

LEINSTER PREVIEW

by ROD NAWN

WHEN was an Ulster game against Leinster anything other than important, anything less than vital to each side?

in what captain Heaslip described as a ’slugfest’. The real Leinster was on show on the Mediterranean coast, the one which many pundits thought had gone missing this season, which had drastically under- performed under O’Connor. Like all professional sports clubs the jury will remain out until the end of the season and an audit of the trophies won is conducted, but there was telling evidence that Ulster’s opponents at Kingspan Stadium this evening have rediscovered their hunger. Ulster will not have been surprised at the events at the Stade Velodrome, and as Doak and his coaching team have insisted, since the important bonus point wins over Cardiff and in Connacht this month, that Leinster will offer perhaps the sternest PRO12 test of the season to date. In the last six meetings Ulster has won just once, but all the games – bar the 2012 Heineken European Cup Final loss for Brian McLaughlin’s fine, emerging team at Twickenham in 2012 – have been very close, even contests. “You look at the number of internationals in the squad, and how heavily Ireland turns to Leinster, and you have to understand that you’re taking on one of the ‘big beasts’ of modern rugby”, says Doak. “Yes, our form has been encouraging; we have our focus firmly on this game, not on anyone else. Of course the Top Four is the target, and a home play-off semi-final ideally, but a lot can happen over three games, and Leinster may seem well adrift at the moment but that can so easily change.” The home crowd will hope that the league’s top scorer Craig Gilroy can maintain his prolific run of form, that the returning Tommy Bowe can dismember the Leinster defence as thrillingly as he did Connacht’s in Galway two weeks ago. Rory Best demonstrated in that game just why he is Ireland’s top hooker and just

In the amateur era, when the Inter- Provincials constituted the greater part of the competitive season the pre-Christmas clash very regularly decided the title. Now, whether it is in Europe, or like this evening in the PRO12, the teams collide at a key moment in their respective campaigns, for skippers Rory Best and Jamie Heaslip the league is the only remaining path to lifting silverware. On paper Ulster at home, third in the table and scoring freely, unusually start as favourites, a tag the players would probably not want, and coach Neil Doak would dismiss. Leinster’s PRO12 form of late has been, at best, indifferent, on the club’s last outing a defeat to the Dragons in Newport consigning Matt O’Connor’s star-studded squad to a relatively distant fifth spot in the table, with just three games to complete the regular season before those critical top four play-offs next month. For a side which has won the title in the last two seasons, and which has a European Cup record which drove it to the No.1 ranking in the northern hemisphere, travelling to Belfast in late April needing a win and hoping others currently in the qualifying places slip up is not quite the ‘norm’. But cast your minds back just five days and there’s a hint to what this Leinster side is capable of when, as O’Connor puts it, it ‘can put the best lads on the park’. The dramatic extra-time defeat to Toulon in Marseilles demonstrated so much about the Blues’ character and commitment when the odds seemed stacked in favour of the champions of Europe. Doak had predicted that the French could not take the opposition for granted, and in a compelling – if less-than-thrilling – 80 minutes Leinster matched Toulon in almost every area, negating the danger that lurks in almost every position in that array of superstars and giving as good as they got

ROD NAWN

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ULSTER RUGBY

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