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

Ryan is out of the sling anyway. There's a video of him and the other Leinster squad members applauding the team at full time.

I hope that means he's close to making a return anyway.

Have absolutely zero interest in the Challenge Cup personally. If you gave me the option of winning the Challenge Cup or just being involved in the Champions Cup with no guarantees at all would pick the latter every-time.

Happy for Connors. An injury free run would be nice.

Indo is reporting that Ringrose is set to return on Saturday.

Frawley and McCarthy back in training too after their knocks.

Frawley lacks pace which is going to be a problem v TOulouse, if JOB is up and running, fit and gets a game or two under his belt he will have to be considered

Congratulations to Culhane!

A trophy is better than no trophy. But if you consider yourself a big team, you want to win the big trophies. And the Champions Cup is immeasurably bigger than the Challenge Cup. If Leinster lose to Toulouse, I don't think any Leinster players, if you were to ask them, will tell you that they'd rather have been in the Challenge Cup final as they'd have had a better chance of winning. Also, if Leinster won the Challenge Cup, nobody would give two sh*ts and they'd be (rightly) slaughtered for being in the Challenge Cup in the first place.

Interested to see how many armchair psychologists will be building up the Final around how Leinster are in the heads of the Toulouse players and how another loss against Leinster might 'destroy' or 'break' them as a squad?

Toulouse's losses to Leinster over the last few years have been far heavier than what Leinster dealt with from LaR.

Joe McCarthy is the lock I thought Baird would be.

I'd disagree on the Baird part. He made one superb run but he had some notable errors on re-watch and I'm not sure he'll be delighted with his showing. Getting stripped by them inside their 22 very easily and then held up on his own 5m line were big moments that could have been very costly. I assume he was running the line out in the last 30 minutes also when we started to come under real pressure there and became very sloppy.

Fully agree on the kicking. Not including clearing kicks, we put up contestable kicks 9 times between the 51st minute (when we made the first raft of subs and appeared to change approach) and 76th minute. All of these kicks were from roughly our own 10m line or further up the field (a couple in their half) so it was good, clean attacking ball in decent positions.

Another strong performance from Doris. Noticed we used McCarthy quite a lot as the tight carrier, whilst Doris was tasked with doing the clearing out.

Frawley is a surprise.

Some time ago when I was a lurker of the forum I remember somebody put together a list of when contracts were up, contract length etc of each player. I’ve had a search but can’t seem to find the post. I don’t suppose anybody has it handy or has a similar list or contract lengths/expiries?

Leinster teasing a "scoop" amongst their contract signings today.