Oldschool wrote: ↑May 9th, 2021, 7:04 pm ROG was talking nonsense (as in there's no way I'm telling Leinster what we planned) when referring to targeting Conan and Henshaw.
He knew exactly what our weakest position (neither Conan or Henshaw fit that criteria) was and so it panned out,
It's been our problem position for quite some time now and quite a few punters have mentioned it before.
So what is to do?
I'm not sure that ROG was wrong or what he meant by "targeting" Henshaw and Conan. It's perfectly logical to 'target' the biggest threats of the opposition. Often, in doing so, you try to isolate them or, failing that, double-team them. Leinster did it with Tagdh Beirne on a couple of occasions, notably in a European s/f. I would love to have some idea of the other elements of La Rochelle's tactics. If Henshaw and Conan were our biggest perceived threats, what were our anticipated weaknesses? What weaknesses were they trying to defend on their side?
All the talk about the physical dominance of the LAR front five is not borne out by analysis of the game, until the final ten minutes. Even when Healy was substituted, Byrne survived the scrums well. We certainly missed Rhys and our second-row never had the same impact as in the Exeter game. But neither of those factors was either evident or dominant in the first 30 minutes when we should have capitalised on the opportunities we created but didn't take.
When we have figured out exactly what happened against LAR, and why, we can start to correct it. To jump to easy conclusions before then could be a waste of time and effort.