Leinster Team Talk/Gossip/Rumours Thread XII (The Byrne Supremacy)

The pitch for tomorrow is already cutting up bad in the Challenge Cup Final. Hopefully it doesn’t cause any issues for tomorrow.

Is this signing actually happening? He seems to be a really good player but I can't make heads nor tails of why Leinster are signing a centre.

I think Frawley probably is going to switch back. Sexton is coming into his last season.

Lads the same questions about Leinster have once again been raised. When the pressure came on we couldn't get our attacking game going. Handling errors abound and inaccuracies in our passing and decision-making.

Starting to wonder if they just don't have the mentality to win through when put under severe pressure.

our scrum is the problem .confidence affected as all terrified to knock on as guaranteed peno against us,better team won ,no complaints,

I'm disappointed for Sexton. It's his last chance to win a Champions Cup and he said it himself in the build up to the match.

I genuinely don't know where Leinster goes from here. We developed a more expansive attacking game in reaction to defeats against La Rochelle and Saracens. But in the face of a high pressure final we reverted to basic rugby and we're swallowed up. Either we don't learn or we are incapable of keeping our heads.

Don't think I've ever been so annoyed at a lost game. We fuckin threw it away. It looked to me like thry sealed the ball off multiple times last 5 minutes, Barnes didn't give a ****

I think La Rochelle deserve credit more than it being Leinster being bad. They're very good at the breakdown. Leinster weren't able to get their fast ruck ball game going for more than a few phases in the whole game. In contrast, La Rochelle's ball was clean and they could play at the tempo they wanted.

It's hugely disappointing, but there was no lack of effort out there today.

I thought the scrum and maul actually held up pretty well.

Cullen has very little to do with it, I think. The team finished bottom of their Euro pool when he was the coach. Lancaster coaches the team now. It is what it is. He's far better than Smith was at building the squad by getting young players up to speed quickly, which is more than enough to win the league, but he's not as good at prepping the team for peak performances against the very best opposition.

Smith's v. Lancaster's Leinster in the Heineken Cup is the same story as how they both got on coaching in the 6N, which begs the question where do Leinster go from here? Would bringing in a McNamara as attack coach make enough of a difference? It's not as if Leinster are far away. They just need that extra one or two percent.

We couldn't adapt to the pressure they were putting on the 2nd receiver channel. There was space to exploit but we rarely found it. Our offloading game was very minimal today, which stymied the flow of the attacking wave.

Leinster and Ireland need to work on the ability to counter that rush. It's going it be the main area teams will look to attack us. Either faster passes to beat the edge, kicks behind the defensive line, or have a player who can offload thru the tackle.

Would Murphy at blindside and McCarthy in from the start have resulted in La Rochelle players being cleared out of the breakdown more effectively?

...

We're the new All Blacks from 1987-2011 or current Man City. Serial bottlers.

We have by the best, most expensive squad in Europe yet we choke every single year. I'm just fed up.

Everybody was creaming themselves over our forwards throwing a few nice passes v Toulouse, but yet again they fail to front up against the big boys. We need a Thorn, Hines or Fardy in that pack. Our second row is tiny and I think that's also the root of our scrum problems. Furlong is not a weak scrummager.

I really don't know where we go from here. Something needs to change. One Heineken Cup in 10 years is pitiful given our resources and player pool.