Leinster v Bulls Friday RDS 19:35 TG4

[LeRouxIsPHat]

A euro cup final, top of the league, league semi final. The Turnip jugglers would give their left one for that season. We are victims of our own success

Its a poor league and has been for years. Bullied.

Meh, we had more hairline success

Except around the fringes…

[MylesNaGapoleen]

Can’t say I expected that level of performance. I certainly didn’t think winning was a foregone conclusion but I expected a lot more than that.

We make some really strange decisions in big games. Why the f%~k were we chasing tries via a malfunctioning lineout instead of taking easy points when we were only ten points down with loads of time left? The coaches and the leaders in the team messed that up big time. I actually think the players were so riled up that they wanted to put the Bulls in their place and lost sight of the job at hand.

Why wasn’t Johnny on at HT? Why wasn’t Hugo on the bench?

Power obviously a huge issue again. The only big hit I can remember, and there may be more I’m forgetting but there certainly weren’t many, was from Larmour? McCarthy put himself about at the breakdown as usual but I don’t remember any big tackles from the forwards. Just soak soak soak.

The only way we could slow them down was by not rolling away and giving away penalties. The lack of power up front meant we were forcing passes at times as well then but the support players were often too focused on the next breakdown because we knew we’d be in trouble there. A very panicky performance from such an experienced side.

You’ll never have your full side out at the end of the season but there are definitely areas we can improve up front with lads coming through or returning from injury. Combine that with smarter selections and smarter decisions during games and the losing margins should disappear.

In the medium term it might be good for ourselves and Ireland that we’ve been taught a few lessons in the last few months. There’ll be no sense of feeling we’ve cracked it a year out from the World Cup this time. Interesting to see if we learn enough from this before the trip to NZ though.

Awful end to the season but thanks to everyone for all the good days and best wishes to all those who are leaving. Oh and massive credit to the Bulls, that was a huge performance and they fully deserved to win.

fair comments but didn't the lads just take a lot of heat for not going for corner in marseille?
in fairness, I thought the bulls were simply immense. blew us away. I prefer flair over power but after watching the seige of marseille 2022 from just a few metres away...and similar in St James Park....we do seem to have an issue when confronted with a solid power game.

[Leinsterimp]

Questions have to be asked about why we’re bringing on replacements so late.

I get with backs at times in a close game if you think the lads starting are of a better quality and their work rate is still high you’d keep them on as typically they get through less of the physical work in a game. But decisions like giving Healy a few minutes and Ruddock only about 10/15 today and the final, McCarthy 2 in the final, just seems crazy and bad management.

[Oldschoolsocks]

Its a poor league and has been for years. Bullied.

Meh, we had more hairline success

Except around the fringes…

We probably should have split down the middle?

[LeRouxIsPHat]

fair comments but didn't the lads just take a lot of heat for not going for corner in marseille?
in fairness, I thought the bulls were simply immense. blew us away. I prefer flair over power but after watching the seige of marseille 2022 from just a few metres away...and similar in St James Park....we do seem to have an issue when confronted with a solid power game.

They did but not from me, I was happy with every single call in the La Rochelle game.

Going back to the French game I thought that was an awful call to take the points near the end of that one. You take each case on its merits IMO and today it made no sense to keep going to the corner.

[Oldschoolsocks]

Can’t say I expected that level of performance. I certainly didn’t think winning was a foregone conclusion but I expected a lot more than that.

We make some really strange decisions in big games. Why the f%~k were we chasing tries via a malfunctioning lineout instead of taking easy points when we were only ten points down with loads of time left? The coaches and the leaders in the team messed that up big time. I actually think the players were so riled up that they wanted to put the Bulls in their place and lost sight of the job at hand.

Why wasn’t Johnny on at HT? Why wasn’t Hugo on the bench?

Power obviously a huge issue again. The only big hit I can remember, and there may be more I’m forgetting but there certainly weren’t many, was from Larmour? McCarthy put himself about at the breakdown as usual but I don’t remember any big tackles from the forwards. Just soak soak soak.

The only way we could slow them down was by not rolling away and giving away penalties. The lack of power up front meant we were forcing passes at times as well then but the support players were often too focused on the next breakdown because we knew we’d be in trouble there. A very panicky performance from such an experienced side.

You’ll never have your full side out at the end of the season but there are definitely areas we can improve up front with lads coming through or returning from injury. Combine that with smarter selections and smarter decisions during games and the losing margins should disappear.

In the medium term it might be good for ourselves and Ireland that we’ve been taught a few lessons in the last few months. There’ll be no sense of feeling we’ve cracked it a year out from the World Cup this time. Interesting to see if we learn enough from this before the trip to NZ though.

Awful end to the season but thanks to everyone for all the good days and best wishes to all those who are leaving. Oh and massive credit to the Bulls, that was a huge performance and they fully deserved to win.

fair comments but didn't the lads just take a lot of heat for not going for corner in marseille?
in fairness, I thought the bulls were simply immense. blew us away. I prefer flair over power but after watching the seige of marseille 2022 from just a few metres away...and similar in St James Park....we do seem to have an issue when confronted with a solid power game.

So…

I would have been one of the masses who gave heat for taking the penalty kicks in Marseilles, but I wasn’t really. What I’m trying to say is that the team needs to figure out on the pitch how to win the match, and going to the corner to a malfunctioning lineout turned out to be the wrong answer.

[mildlyinterested]

A euro cup final, top of the league, league semi final. The Turnip jugglers would give their left one for that season. We are victims of our own success

Its a poor league and has been for years. Bullied.

MI your level of entitlement is truly staggering.

fair enough.. if you think losing at home to that bulls side is acceptable well thats your perogative..

[Up Wexford]

Disappointed in that result but I cant be angry at it. We finally have a) a rivalry and b) a realistic view of our current position in world rugby, at least since 2018 and maybe since 2 years prior to that. We are fantastic team of footballers, but adversity is simply not our thing, and that is why J10 has been so crucial to our continued success. To the people who said the crowd got behind us, it only began when Johnny came on and kicked our starting XV up the arse.

We've always known the key to Leinster success, its been our amazing homegrown talent plus a massive b$&%@#d of a loose forward (Rocky, Hines, Thorne, Fardy) plus a supremely talented homegrown b$&%@#d of our own (Johnny, Seanie). There is a very clear path to Leinster dominance and we will be back again next year. I have it on good authority that Leo had a 28 year old New Zealand second row to sign along with Ala'alatoa which would have certainly brought us two cups this year (barring injury ofc) and this was blocked by the IRFU. If we recruit properly next year we'll be back at the top. If we don't, we wont.

So proud of our boys who didnt want to loose tonight, JVdF, Ports, J10, Ringer, Henshaw, Larmour. And full credit to the Bulls, big men, hard tacklers, and played with an arrogance and assurance we simply dont face 11 months of the year. We'll be back, allez le Blues (of Dublin and not Pretoria!)

[chrismcc]

This place was wall to wall people complaining cause we kicked our penalties vs LAR. Kick to the corner, they said, play the way we’ve been playing all season they said. Now we go balls out and we should have been more conservative?

Will yis give over

Stop making me second guess myself

[ronk]

A Bulls win is great for the league long term. Winning everything is t good for us. It's fun though.

I thought the ref was very generous with them and they got some very lucky calls. Some of the advantages were unusually long but we didn't get any. Including one that really went against us.

They were physical and powerful but well drilled. Their movement on the ground in the lineout flummoxed us. The one lineout right in front of me we competed on and they got away with clearly not straight.

They scored a try off a dropped ball that might well have been forward. I was 60m away from the knock on try and everyone around me was watching the replay be ause they thought it was dropped. We were lucky it went on screen. They should have an inkling live that there was a chance. Bad bad miss. We had a good defence generally. The 5m tap and go they scored was a move I haven't seen since the cavalry charge was banned. Regardless it was a clever variation on a move. They needed trickery to score. We weren't hanging in. They were delaying the game a lot and were given huge latitude to do so.

But the ref didn't make us drop kicks under no pressure, they didn't make us drop cleanly taken lineouts. That's on us.

We had huge emotional and unnecessary wins the weeks before the final and tonight. May e that wasn't the right prep for us but maybe we didn't do ourselves any favours.

I think next year we can't waste the tour to SA. We should go there to win because we need to know how to win there.

Huge congrats to the Bulls. They played some good rugby after a short turnaround long distance away trip and they put us under a lot of pressure. When they cleared their lines with a turnover and we put out a 50-22 on the full was probably the key moment of the early match. They got the territory to go score rather than go back under pressure.

This was another game that was made for Toner. Yes he's faded but I felt he had another big game in him and he's still tall.

Finally, Furlong didn't look right after that scrum. We got him off before the lineout. Good player management.

[Up Wexford]

censoring it autocorrected by the forum apparently. Also to whoever said our pack was 30kg lighter, they must be an automated forum trolling bot. the Bulls dealt with our pick and go comfortably. And at the risk of being facetious I have to agree with Mildly Interested, I love my home games at the RDS but 40-odd to nil wins at home to Cardiff/Glasgow/Edinburgh whoever was never going to prepare us to be champions in the proper sense of the word. With the addition of SA we have a proper league to get fired up about. And the Stormers are bette than this current iteration of the Bulls

[paddyor]

I don’t feel like we were blown away at all. Definitely a more physical game than we’re used to but we’d ample chance to score and fluffed it in the corner. Granted we were rebuffed 2-3 minutes in but I thought that was just dumb.

There first try was a lucky bounce. Second was a lovely sleight of hand. We did actually force them back several times on the goal line particularly in the start of the second half. Almost rucked them off their own ball under the posts.

Felt like we started chasing the game after they went 17-10 up.

[hugonaut]

Another big underperformance in a knockout unfortunately. It's now a commonly recurring theme.

Questions to be asked of the management and our mental preperation at this stage.

Forward coaching clearly an issue as well.

Lineout and maul taken apart today again. Combine that with our scrum issues and it's a familiar pattern.

Bulls pack were 30kg lighter than ours. Power isn't our issue, it's being able to play under pressure and our set piece, including maul that's the issue.

Such a disappointing way to end the season.

Bulls pack 30kg lighter? I would take that with a pinch of salt. It didn't look like that out there. If you go by the weights on the Bulls website [here: https://bullsrugby.co.za/profiles/vodacom-bulls/], I think it works out as pretty much even-steven.

Elrigh Louw 112kg [-2kg]
Arno Botha 108kg [+5kg]
Marcel Coetzee 116kg [+10kg]
Walt Steenkamp 121kg [+2kg]
Ruan Nortje 113kg [-2kg]
Mornay Smith 109kg [-16kg]
Johan Grobelaar 98kg [-13kg]
Gerhard Steenkamp 128kg [+14kg]

They had a bigger backrow, we had a heavier front row, second row cancelled each other out.

ESPN have us with 13 turnover knock-ons [source: https://www.espn.com/rugby/match?gameId ... gue=270557 ] ... I wasn't counting them, but it did seem like a lot. Between the knock-ons and the stolen/or disrupted lineouts, we put ourselves under pressure and, conversely, they did a great job of relieving pressure on themselves.

I can't recall a lineout taking us apart like that, and I have to take my hat off to them. A brilliant performance out of touch. They had obviously done some outstanding work in the limited time available to them, they executed brilliantly and absolutely took us to the woodshed in that part of the game.

I was very impressed with their tackling, their kick-chase and their intensity. Those South Africans worked hard and never let up. The penalty try/yellow card was the opposite end of the field from me so very difficult to see what happened there. I'll hold my whist on that until I see a replay.

Very disappointing to lose at home in a SF – very deflating. We don't lose many games at home and it's a tough scene. But we were second best out there today.

[dropkick]

Can’t say I expected that level of performance. I certainly didn’t think winning was a foregone conclusion but I expected a lot more than that.

We make some really strange decisions in big games. Why the f%~k were we chasing tries via a malfunctioning lineout instead of taking easy points when we were only ten points down with loads of time left? The coaches and the leaders in the team messed that up big time. I actually think the players were so riled up that they wanted to put the Bulls in their place and lost sight of the job at hand.

Why wasn’t Johnny on at HT? Why wasn’t Hugo on the bench?

Power obviously a huge issue again. The only big hit I can remember, and there may be more I’m forgetting but there certainly weren’t many, was from Larmour? McCarthy put himself about at the breakdown as usual but I don’t remember any big tackles from the forwards. Just soak soak soak.

The only way we could slow them down was by not rolling away and giving away penalties. The lack of power up front meant we were forcing passes at times as well then but the support players were often too focused on the next breakdown because we knew we’d be in trouble there. A very panicky performance from such an experienced side.

You’ll never have your full side out at the end of the season but there are definitely areas we can improve up front with lads coming through or returning from injury. Combine that with smarter selections and smarter decisions during games and the losing margins should disappear.

In the medium term it might be good for ourselves and Ireland that we’ve been taught a few lessons in the last few months. There’ll be no sense of feeling we’ve cracked it a year out from the World Cup this time. Interesting to see if we learn enough from this before the trip to NZ though.

Awful end to the season but thanks to everyone for all the good days and best wishes to all those who are leaving. Oh and massive credit to the Bulls, that was a huge performance and they fully deserved to win.

fair comments but didn't the lads just take a lot of heat for not going for corner in marseille?
in fairness, I thought the bulls were simply immense. blew us away. I prefer flair over power but after watching the seige of marseille 2022 from just a few metres away...and similar in St James Park....we do seem to have an issue when confronted with a solid power game.

Leinster can be very robotic. The patterns rely on ruck speed to get going whereas irelands attack look more fluid. So while the players are well drilled the attack might be an issue.


To be fair they don't have enough hard games to bring on the attack.

[paddyor]

Its a poor league and has been for years. Bullied.

MI your level of entitlement is truly staggering.

fair enough.. if you think losing at home to that bulls side is acceptable well thats your perogative..

No one is saying it’s “acceptable “, whatever that means.

[Up Wexford]

A Bulls win is great for the league long term. Winning everything is t good for us. It's fun though.

I thought the ref was very generous with them and they got some very lucky calls. Some of the advantages were unusually long but we didn't get any. Including one that really went against us.

They were physical and powerful but well drilled. Their movement on the ground in the lineout flummoxed us. The one lineout right in front of me we competed on and they got away with clearly not straight.

They scored a try off a dropped ball that might well have been forward. I was 60m away from the knock on try and everyone around me was watching the replay be ause they thought it was dropped. We were lucky it went on screen. They should have an inkling live that there was a chance. Bad bad miss. We had a good defence generally. The 5m tap and go they scored was a move I haven't seen since the cavalry charge was banned. Regardless it was a clever variation on a move. They needed trickery to score. We weren't hanging in. They were delaying the game a lot and were given huge latitude to do so.

But the ref didn't make us drop kicks under no pressure, they didn't make us drop cleanly taken lineouts. That's on us.

We had huge emotional and unnecessary wins the weeks before the final and tonight. May e that wasn't the right prep for us but maybe we didn't do ourselves any favours.

I think next year we can't waste the tour to SA. We should go there to win because we need to know how to win there.

Huge congrats to the Bulls. They played some good rugby after a short turnaround long distance away trip and they put us under a lot of pressure. When they cleared their lines with a turnover and we put out a 50-22 on the full was probably the key moment of the early match. They got the territory to go score rather than go back under pressure.

This was another game that was made for Toner. Yes he's faded but I felt he had another big game in him and he's still tall.

Finally, Furlong didn't look right after that scrum. We got him off before the lineout. Good player management.

Have to agree with your point on Furlong. He's being flogged and would have started the final, and then straight into starting three tests V NZ next month, after a Lions tour last July. Dont be surprised if we dont see him til after December next season

[LeinsterLeader]

Its a poor league and has been for years. Bullied.

MI your level of entitlement is truly staggering.

fair enough.. if you think losing at home to that bulls side is acceptable well thats your perogative..

Like I said. I thought you weren’t arsed (or was that just when you thought the win was a forgone conclusion?). In which case why does it now all of a sudden matter to you?

[paddyor]

Luke Mcgrath hasn’t adapted well to eithe
1)the new game plan
B)becoming No. 2

A bit nervous of him being the guy to come on and close out/win a game.

[Up Wexford]

I don’t feel like we were blown away at all. Definitely a more physical game than we’re used to but we’d ample chance to score and fluffed it in the corner. Granted we were rebuffed 2-3 minutes in but I thought that was just dumb.

There first try was a lucky bounce. Second was a lovely sleight of hand. We did actually force them back several times on the goal line particularly in the start of the second half. Almost rucked them off their own ball under the posts.

Felt like we started chasing the game after they went 17-10 up.

Blown away might be the wrong word, but theres been a definite and obvious trend to how we have lost since 2018.

If we aren't honest with ourselves and tackle it head on, we'll just end up like Munster and convince ourselves we are just the bounce of a ball away from the big win etc etc.

[JohnB]

Firstly, well done to the Bulls and Jake White. They executed their game plan, didn't give us any space around the fringes and were in our faces the whole time and it worked. They're entitled to be pleased with themselves. We wanted the SA teams in our League to raise the level of competition which as Glasgow showed last week has been increasingly poor from the non-Irish teams and this defeat is the first fruit of that.

Sexton showed once again that Leinster will be a very different creature without him. He brought a direction to our play when he came on that had been missing throughout the 2nd and 3rd quarters. I agree with one of the other posters that the scrum penalty against Porter was simply wrong. His opponent's knees were on the ground and it should have been a penalty to us. Hindsight is always 20-20 but the Bulls seem to have done their research into our line out. I wonder what the impact on it was of not having Moloney there calling it as he's done so often this season?

I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the team and management for the journey they've taken us on this season. There have been lots of great and elevating moments for us to to enjoy thanks to them all. Here's to next season and I hope that the squad manages to get some downtime and rest over the summer.