Leinster ground and brutalised their way to a sixth league trophy in a manner that was redolent of Joe Schmidt’s Ireland at their peak. Up against a raucous hometown crowd in a tight stadium on a wet day, the reigning champions measured pragmatism against ambition and tuned their game to the key of W. Just win, baby.
If you get to the Pro14 final, and you’re not Leinster, odds are that you’re going to face them there. The Big East have appeared in eight of ten finals since the competition adopted the playoff format.
The league has been critical to the development of a rugby culture specific to the province and informs the identity of the modern Leinster set-up emotionally, procedurally and mechanically.
Emotion, §1: I Am Hi-i-i-i-igh on Emotion
It was the first trophy that Leinster won in the professional era. Back in December 2001, Reggie Corrigan captained 14 men to a famous victory over rivals Munster in Lansdowne Road, winning the inaugural Celtic League. There were two good teams out on the floodlit sward that afternoon, but when Eric Miller was sent off after 25 minutes [he kicked the late Anthony Foley in the balls in a fit of pique], it looked like a well-matched start to the game would collapse to a one-sided rout.
It never happened. Leinster’s under-rated pack stuck at it, and Gordon D’Arcy and Shane Horgan – playing in each other’s long term positions, incidentally – scored late, long-range tries to upset Munster and take the spoils in front of a large and well-entertained crowd. In retrospect, that 14-man victory over Munster seems like a little bit of a false start, but you never forget your first time.
Emotion, §2: Another Time, Another Team
However, the foundation stone of Leinster’s dominance over the last decade was laid down in the league campaign of 2007-08. Back then, the competition was ‘just’ the Celtic League: there were no playoffs, no Italian sides, and the South African influence was restricted to sole traders spread amongst the ten teams of the league.
Cullen and Jennings raise the Premiership trophy for the Tigers in May 2007, the culmination of their time in Leicester. The Tigers had a load of Irish players on their books back then – aside from the two Leinster exiles, Geordan, Johne and Frank Murphy, Paul Burke, Ian Humphries and Gavin Hickie were all paid-up midlanders in the mid-00s. *The Mole would consider the first generation Leicester pack to be one containing Rowntree, Cockerill, Garforth, Martin Johnson, John Wells, Neil Back and Dean ‘Deano’ Richards.
It’s a story that has been told before: Leo Cullen and Shane Jennings arrived back in Dublin from Leicester, where they had spent two seasons embedded in the fierce, second-generation Leicester pack: Ayerza, Chuter, Castrogiovanni, White, Kay, Moody and Corry*. In Donnybrook, Michael Cheika was making some progress [and as many missteps] in dismantling the pack that had been embarrassed by Munster in the landmark 2006 Heineken Cup semi-final.
A hard-barking coach now had tough and able lieutenants on the training pitch and in the dressing room, and those three men brought their characters to bear on the front half of the Leinster squad. The good-time charlies and second-rate journeymen were sidelined.
Like any notable event, the timing of their return sits within a wider context; in this case, the contemporary state of Irish rugby. Blood from the RWC07 debacle was on the walls. The domestic season started late, and Leinster’s first match took place the day after Ireland had been practically nilled by France [it finished 25-3, but it felt like a nilling]. Eddie O’Sullivan had only selected one Leinster forward in his tournament squad. Sixteen forwards, and only one of them from Leinster.
Emotion, §3: Pissed Offedness As Emotional Stimulant: A Working Group
Cullen and Jennings had been brought back into the Irish fold at the end of their stints with Leicester, making a late May tour to Argentina with O’Sullivan’s shadow squad as soon as they had finished their terms in England. Keith Gleeson [then 31] and Jamie Heaslip [then 23] were at the opposite ends of their respective careers. They too travelled to Argentina in May – Heaslip winning his second cap and Gleeson his second last on that tour – but both missed out on the Irish RWC07 squad at the final cut. So did Bernard Jackman, the Coolkenna-born hooker who, after a peripatetic career, had returned to his home province as he entered into his fourth decade. Jackman played in both tests off the bench in Santa Fe and Buenos Aires but couldn’t force his way into the squad for France. Six Leinster forwards were on the fringes of O’Sullivan’s squad, and only one of them – veteran lock Mal O’Kelly, who had been squeezed out of the starting line-up by Donncha O’Callaghan after the 2006 Six Nations – got the nod.
It didn’t feel like it at the time, but there was a significant upside for the province. The returning ex-Tigers had considerable time on the training pitch with their new team-mates; there was a core of pack members who were there or thereabouts in terms of international quality, most of whom must have been nursing grievances over missing the World Cup squad [especially the backrowers, who had all missed out on Eddie O’Sullivan’s squad of blindsides]; a high proportion of those same forwards had garnered experience outside the province [Cullen and Jennings at Leicester, Jackman at Sale, Gleeson for the Waratahs in Sydney]; and in any case, that RWC07 was a sh*t-show that they were well out of. The province was just short on props, and the couple of missing pieces came from unlikely sources.
Emotion, §4: Positivity With The Cheeky Chappies And Tough Customers
29 year old Cook Islander Stan Wright had arrived in Dublin in late 2006 as a joker, but sweated off a vat of blubber over a brutal pre-season and came back a different player. There was always a big strong islander hidden beneath the roly-poly, and in the days of seven-man benches, Wright’s versatility and toughness was invaluable. He played in 23 of Leinster’s 24 games that season, starting 21 of them and averaging better than 75mins/start.
While le Roux earned the vast majority of his 54 Springbok caps from the bench, that seems more a reflection on his style of play and ability to scrummage on both sides – vital in the days of the seven-man bench – than his talent as a prop. He had an irrepressible self-confidence in his prowess as a player and an athlete which seemed at odds with his rotund carriage, but he backed it up in every match he played for Leinster. With immense strength, speed off the mark and a huge engine all well-wrapped in a 130kg+ body, he was a genuine one-off.
The key part of the puzzle was Ollie le Roux, an enormous baby-faced smiler who defied all sorts of conventions. He was overweight but a phenomenal athlete, a schoolboy international at rugby, squash and waterpolo. He was old – 34 when he arrived – and had been discarded by the Springboks in 2002 after more than 50 test caps, but had a phenomenal capacity for work on the pitch. Obviously good natured to the point of gregariousness, he was a fierce competitor who took no guff from anybody at all, and frequently bullied opposite numbers.
Le Roux arrived into Ireland at the end of October after the Currie Cup and immediately set the tone with a bravura performance against Ulster. He went on to win four Man of the Match awards, but his influence wasn’t restricted to solo turns. He made a deep impact on the play of his fellow front rowers in Leinster. Everyone got better when Ollie was in the team. It’s no surprise that Birch Jackman had the best season of his career, or that Stan Wright turned from an easy punch-line into a serious competitor, or that a young Cian Healy came to him for tips.
He also showed in a late-season interview with Gerry Thornley that behind the convivial nature there was an appreciation of the role of sport in life, and a perceptive – even prescient – rugby mind:
“You want to be part of something that’s on the verge of something big, and I think if Leinster play their cards right they’re going to be one of the big clubs in Europe over the next five or 10 years. I just think if things go right here then I think they can be on a par with the Toulouses, Wasps and Leicesters of the game.”
Emotion, §5: One Of The Big Clubs In Europe
In tone, that’s the general sort of valediction that lots of departing players offer to an employer if they’ve enjoyed their stay, but the particulars catch the eye.
Leinster were on the verge of something big: they would tie up the league the following week, and the following season they dumped rivals and European champions Munster out of the Heineken Cup in the biggest game of club rugby Ireland has ever seen.
Le Roux gave that interview when Leinster essentially had the league in the bag: all they needed to tie it up was to get a single point from a home fixture against the Dragons. The big fella duly delivered two tries in the opening ten minutes and set the tone for a romp to the trophy.
Since that campaign, Leinster have have won four European Cups, four leagues under three different nomenclatures [Celtic, Pro12 and Pro14] and the European Challenge Cup, as well as two British & Irish Cups and the Celtic Cup at ‘A’ level – nine major trophies and three minors.
Of the six trophies the province have competed for over the last two seasons, they’ve won four – the Heineken Cup in 2017-18, the Pro14 in 2017-18 and 2018-19 and the Celtic Cup in 2018-19 – and been beaten finalists in the remaining two competitions [the 2018-19 Heineken Cup and the 2017-18 British & Irish Cup]. It’s a level of consistent excellence that few teams in Europe have ever attained.
Mechanics, §1: Never See How Laws Or Sausages Are Made
How can a competition affect the culture of an outfit ‘mechanically’? What’s that supposed to mean?
By mechanics, I’m trying to describe the working practices of the rugby side of the Leinster organisation that don’t take place in-game. It’s not on-pitch performance, nor the strategic, tactical or skill-based side of coaching; it has something to do with the administration of Leinster as a business, but not a huge amount to do with the other elements of that side of the organisation [i.e. marketing and governance].
On the most basic level, it’s the process of assembling and maintaining a viable and competitive squad. In this regard, the working practices of Leinster – as with all provinces – are limited by significant strictures placed upon them by the IRFU. Leinster do not operate in an open market for players; the province can only recruit low numbers of players from outside the Irish market and even then, these select view have to be signed off by an authority outside the organisation.
If a player feels that he is under-valued within the Irish system – either in purely monetary terms, or as a measure of gametime or competition starts, he [or his agent] can make enquiries to outside parties, i.e. teams in other leagues. It’s important to remember that contract negotiations are just that: negotiations. It’s a process that can take time and entail a lot of back-and-forth, not a one off ‘take it or leave it’ offer.
However, if a player is on a development deal [ii] with a province, another province can offer him a senior deal [iii] on more money; likewise if a player is on an academy contract [i], another province can come in and offer him a development [ii] or senior [iii] deal for considerably more money. It doesn’t mean he has to take it, but he now has options and leverage with his own province.
Just because another province can’t offer a player more money, it doesn’t mean that they can’t offer him things that he’s looking for: it might be guaranteed minimum starts, or guaranteed minutes, or guaranteed games in a specific position, or a combination of all three.
Mechanics, §2: How To Keep Your Employees? Keep Them Happy
Leinster’s squad always shows changes year-to-year. Their players are in demand across every other province in Ireland and in every league in Europe [and now the United States, viz. Cathal Marsh]. Aside from the banalities of commerce, rugby is a brutal sport which runs people into the ground before their time.
Players in Leinster have shown that they will leave a successful team for a less successful one – for no additional money – if the province isn’t meeting very specific demands. Sometimes those demands aren’t quite in line with what the key decision-makers [in this situation, essentially the head coaches] in the organisation feel are the needs of the province as a competitive squad. This dissatisfaction might be based on minutes, it might be based on starts, it might be based on positional selection, it might be based on competition, it might be based on specific positional selection in a specific competition in a specific match.
Three current Irish internationals have walked away from Leinster [two mid-contract, one with an offer on the table] in the last year because they felt that they weren’t being selected often enough in specific positions in specific games. All three players played significant roles in hugely successful seasons, but felt that their ambitions and interests weren’t being best served in their current situation. It’s a reality that every province has faced at one stage or another: Simon Zebo left Munster to play in Paris, Tommy Bowe left Ulster to play in Swansea [the Paris of Wales] and Robbie Henshaw left Connacht to play for Leinster.
You can’t keep everyone happy, and you can’t keep everyone.
Mechanics, §3: Addition By Subtraction
Leinster sent Ian Nagle and Tom Daly out on loan before Christmas 2018: Nagle went to Ulster in November, and Daly went to Connacht in December. It turned out to be a win-win-win-win-win scenario for everyone involved. Daly and Nagle got games; Ulster and Connacht got players in positions of need; fans of those provinces got a little bit of mid-season excitement from seeing new players added to their respective rosters; Leinster were able to reduce their wage bill by passing on the costs of players for whom they didn’t really have plans; and the IRFU got value for money, paying players to play rather than just train.
“… the player and coach market continues to inflate at a greater rate than general inflation. As we have seen the participation of the South African teams in PRO14 resulted in an increase in funding to the four Provincial teams which has helped to keep pace with inflation but we cannot reasonably anticipate such increases every year.”
[IRFU Annual Report 2017-18, p.43]
Financial prudence isn’t the reason that anybody gets into the game, but somebody’s got to look after the pennies so the pounds can spend themselves.
Mechanics, §4: Replace From Within, And Quickly
In rugby, you genuinely cannae win anything with kids. With that said, you cannae win anything without kids either, especially in the Irish provincial system. No team can afford to be a slave to the market, because the market is, in the wholly pejorative sense, provincial.
The 2017-18 season was lit up by break-out stars James Ryan, Jordan Larmour and Andrew Porter. Ryan and Porter made their test debuts the summer before the season started – Ryan famously playing for Ireland before he had played for Leinster – and Larmour broke into the Six Nations squad in February.
Conor O’Brien took off right on schedule, making thirteen appearances and scoring six tries in his third year in the Academy, switching seamlessly between the No12 and No13 jerseys. Joe Tomane’s patchy performances and torn hamstring presented the Mullingar man with an opportunity, and he seized it.
O’Brien has been on the Leinster radar for a long time: he played his first representative rugby for the province in 2012 as a 16 year old outhalf in the U18 Clubs Interprovincial Championship. He has come through all the age grades of representative rugby as a standout player, featuring at outhalf, in the centres and on the wing, but without the same degree of hype that can attend the rise of the most high profile schools talents.
Shooting stars of that kind are by their nature rare. Leinster didn’t send any nippers to Joe Schmidt in the 2018-19 season, but coaches Cullen and Lancaster put in a significant amount of groundwork for the mid-term, selecting 13 of 19 academy players for Pro14 fixtures over the course of 33 weeks.
Players promoted before their time also made a significant impression: Max ‘Clifford Chance’ Deegan, who entered the academy before the 2016-17 season [and thus would be in Year 3 had he bided by a regular rate of progression] was named Leinster’s Young Player of the Year, and fellow backrower Caelan Doris, fresh out of Year 1, banked 15 games, including 11 starts at No8.
The likes of Conor O’Brien [b.1996], Ciaran Frawley [b.1997], Hughie O’Sullivan [b.1998] and Scott Penny [b.1999] assumed more important roles, and illustrated the varied circumstances which coaches are required to counter via selection.
O’Brien had shown glimpses of his potential during his second year in the academy over the 2017-18 season. But there’s a swing in expectation within camp over the course of the summer: third year is a season-long audition for any academy player. If they can’t positively contribute at Pro14 level in their last year, they can find themselves out of the job before they’ve ever really held it. Cullen’s plan for the Mullingar man was well-conceived and coherently mapped out, and O’Brien passed all tests with flying colours. His performances allowed for a confident transition from an experienced veteran [Reid] to a talented youngster with a higher ceiling. It was the ideal situation.
A less ideal situation was Joey Carbery deciding to leave Leinster mid-contract at the end of the season. Having just finished his first year in the academy, Ciaran Frawley was fast-tracked into Carbery’s wide-ranging role, with the Skerries youngster starting four games at outhalf and filling in further at fullback and first centre when signalled off the bench.
Another different scenario was presented to Cullen when Munster announced early in term that they had signed Nick McCarthy for the 2019-20 season. Having broken his wrist late in pre-season, and with Munster releasing the contract news in mid-October, McCarthy essentially spent the entire season as Leinster’s lame duck. That titular role became literal when he broke his foot in his first start of the season. The forty minutes he managed against the Ospreys in mid-November was the last competitive rugby he would see for more than four months. Hughie O’Sullivan, another player fresh from his first year in the academy, was pushed into service as his replacement. The Belvedere College stand-out had split his schoolboy rugby between scrum-half and fullback and was a real neophyte of a pro scrum-half, but Cullen made the decision to back him rather than trying to bring in a more experienced player from outside the province.
The teenage Scott Penny was put into play as various serious injuries to opensides Dan Leavy, Josh van der Flier, Sean O’Brien and Will Connors stressed the Leinster depth chart. At fifth choice in the depth chart and in his first year in the academy, any level of involvement in the Pro14 is unexpected: five starts and three 80-minute performances is unheralded for a forward.
Mechanics, §5: Identifying Value, Cost and Price
Noel Reid played 91 [58+33] games and 4602 mins over the last five seasons for Leinster. Sean O’Brien played 36 [31+5] and 2230 mins for the province over the same period.
Was Reider more valuable to Leinster than O’Brien in that timeframe? That depends on how you define value. In theory, value is what something is worth to whoever is using it. It’s not the same thing as price; price is a figure that you pay for something. Leinster didn’t have to pay O’Brien, because the IRFU were footing the bill for his salary. In the abstract, whatever his salary, Reid was a bigger monetary cost to Leinster than O’Brien.
Bill Belichick’s mantra of ‘Do Your Job’, the foundation of the New England Patriots’ success, stresses personal responsibility. However, inherent in that statement is the idea that there is nothing on the field that is not covered by somebody’s job description, and that everybody in the organisation is reliant on everybody else over the course of a game to take the actions that are required to win the thing*. They’re all bricks in an arch, acting in compression. Once one brick doesn’t do his job, the whole arch fails. * Also implicit is the threat that if you don’t Do Your Job you won’t Have A Job.
But rugby teams aren’t competing to make a profit, they’re competing to win trophies, so cost is more difficult to pin down than price. To start with first principles [and an obvious point], rugby is a team game. Players rely on each other, and coaches rely on players relying on each other, i.e. playing within a defensive system and not just freelancing around “after the same ball – like they do in children’s rugby. And grown-up Gaelic football.”
O’Brien’s frequent unavailability for selection [because of both IRFU player management protocols and his own injury issues] was a rugby cost for Leinster: it didn’t just impact him, it impacted the players and organisation around him. It disrupted the province’s ability to field their strongest players in a given match [for example, O’Brien only started one of the eight league finals Leinster competed in during his provincial career, and only played in one more]; it negatively impacted on the coaches’ preparation for games; it cannot but have damaged cohesion in unit training; and it probably disrupted morale at certain stages of the season. So while O’Brien’s price [to Leinster] was low, his cost was inversely high.
In contrast, Reid was regularly available for selection and, as a single-position player for the majority of the time in question, a known quantity. He had strengths and weaknesses – every player does – but they were evident and accounted for. His price to Leinster [in terms of salary] would not have been considered high, and those costs were mitigated to a fairly large extent by his reliability. He kept himself in excellent condition, he didn’t pick up many injuries, and he never brought any controversy or bad publicity on himself or the organisation.
But where does that leave the argument for value, or a method of establishing a player’s value? Value is not just a matter of being available for selection. Being available to perform isn’t the same as performing.
We have written previously about the hierarchy of competitions in Irish professional rugby, namely International rugby > Heineken Cup > League. This hierarchy synchronises with the respective age of the competitions, but it is not intrinsically linked: for example, the World Cup is a newer competition than the Five/Six Nations, but it has assumed a higher importance.
At his best, O’Brien was one of the greatest players to have worn the blue; only Slattery could rival him as an openside flanker. During the peak of his career [2011-13], his ability to influence matches was practically peerless in European competition. His value to Leinster was immense, and immensely obvious. He was a game changer and a match winner.
Reid never hit those heights. 107 [88.4%] of his 121 Leinster appearances came in the league, the hierarchical inferior of the cup. He has worked through his career in relative obscurity in comparison with O’Brien, a superstar of the game on the world stage. However, that doesn’t mean that his career wasn’t valuable to Leinster.
Both players have recently left Leinster for English clubs, leaving curiously similar records:
- O’Brien: Played 126, Scored 100 pts.
- Reid: Played 121, Scored 103pts.
Those pat summary figures are reductive: they actively ignore the moments, the attitudes and actions and that made Sean O’Brien such a touchstone for the province during its most successful era to date. But the equivalence of those figures makes one reconsider the importance – and the value – of what could be termed the supporting cast: the likes of Reid, James Tracy [89 appearances in the four seasons from 2015-16 to 2018-19 inclusive], Ross Molony and Michael Bent [80 and 72 respective appearances in the same period] and Rory O’Loughlin [61 appearances in the last three seasons].
These are the players on whom Cullen and Lancaster rely so heavily during the season, players who put in unglamourous stints in Rodney Parade and the Stadio Comunale di Monigo in November and February. They play a lot of games for the province; more than their internationally-recognised peers, in most cases. Wins in those quickly-forgotten fixtures get Leinster to the top of the pile, time after time … and then, more often than not, the majority of these players are sidelined when trophies are up for grabs at the end of the season. But those winning records over the course of the season show the value of those players. There is more than a touch of Milton to it: “who best bear his mild yoke, they serve him best … they also serve who only stand and wait”.
As we wrote before, “having a long professional career means that you’re a top quality player, even if you don’t necessarily rack up a lot of test caps.” There are always talented youngsters coming into and through the academy in the Leinster structure, and fan feeling runs high on getting them into the squad at the expense of a non-international veteran. But age-grade rugby is a protected system, and pro rugby isn’t. Making your way successfully in the absoluto division of the pros is a harder task than starring in the weight-classes of schools or U20s rugby. A successful squad needs a corps of experienced role-players. Their value is understated but essential.
Mechanics, §6: Incentivisation and Disincentivisation
Test rugby provides the IRFU with approximately 80% of its revenue [Ibid. p.42]: that’s a figure of around €68.56m from last year’s total revenues of approximately €85.7m. Gracer outlines total costs to the union at €84.5m, with the professional game costed at €42.3m. Beyond that, the IRFU puts almost €11m into Elite Player Development: that encompasses the National Talent Squad [broadly speaking, young players selected for U18 Schools, U18 Clubs and U19 squads]; the provincial sub-academies; and the provincial academies.
It’s important to stress that this EPD money is coming from a central source and being distributed, without bias or resentment, amongst all the provincial bodies mentioned above. It’s also important to stress the difference in return on investment that is being generated by the Leinster Academy in comparison to the three other provincial academies. The IRFU is reliant on Leinster to the point of the country not being a viable top ten-ranked nation without it. There’s no comparison with the other provinces.
Every province benefits from the same central source of funding, but the IRFU in no way sees equal returns, even allowing for population and demographic inequalities, from their investment in difference branches. To improve the situation in the other provinces, the union have to work out a better scheme of incentives … and disincentives. They’re the ones putting cash on the barrelhead, so they are the ones who should define an improved program.
The production of players for your own purposes is its own reward only to a certain extent, because it’s no reward when they go somewhere else, especially not to a competitor. It’s an active handicap. In the abstract, one has essentially produced a player for one’s opponents, and given them an insight into your preparation, strategy and tactics [and more: the shorthand of ‘intellectual property’ is an appropriate if pompous cover-all]. That’s on top of losing not just the player’s abilities on the pitch, but the time that you invested in him, which could have been invested in another player.
If a Leinster player decides to up sticks and move mid-contract to another province, Leinster should get a transfer fee from wherever he winds up. Any other proposal – including the status quo – is irrational: Leinster are essentially being penalised for operating efficiently, while other provinces are being rewarded for their ineptitude. The money is staying within the provincial system, so there’s nothing that runs contrary to IRFU norms.
Procedure, §1: Who Knows The Plans And Why They Were Drawn Up?
When Joe Schmidt took over at Leinster job in 2010, he essentially drew up the blueprint for how Leinster would approach competing on two fronts whilst being denuded of their best players for the guts of a third of the season. His arrival coincided with the advent of two Italian teams, Benetton Treviso and Aironi, joining the league and the resultant addition of four games to the regular season fixture list.
Michael Cheika operated in an 11-team league for his first two years in charge of Leinster, and then a 10-team competition from the start of the 2007-08 when the Border Reivers folded. In his last season in charge, there were no games in November and only one game in February. He essentially operated under Charlie McCreevy’s maxim: “When I have it, I spend it.” When Cheika had access to his internationals, he picked them. When he didn’t, he’d send a team of kids out with some left-overs.
Schmidt came from the Top14, and better understood the long haul of a 20+ game regular season. Knowing that there were times when he’d have no access at all to his internationals, his priority in selection [not necessarily in terms of his overall job] was to improve his depth. He did that by balancing his league selections, picking a handful of younger players spread through a reasonably experienced starting fifteen. The Mole can only speculate, but it seems very likely that his reasoning was that young players would improve at a faster rate if they were a] selected in stronger teams, and b] selected more frequently in stronger teams. The first year of his tenure was notable for these ‘half-and-half’ selections.
It’s difficult to pick them out now by looking over the teamsheets, because so many of those young players went on to have [and some are still having] big Leinster careers.
- Richardt Strauss [24 @ start of 10-11 season]: 1+5 in 09-10; 29+1 in 10-11| +1963mins
- Devin Toner [24]: 7+5 in 2009-10, 17+5 in 2010-11 | +852 mins
- Rhys Ruddock [19]: 3+0 in 2009-10; 10+7 in 2010-11 | +656 mins
- Dominic Ryan [20]: 2+1 in 2009-10; 15+8 in 2010-11 | +1105 mins
- Sean O’Brien [24]: 10+5 in 2009-10; 21+1 in 2010-11 | +771 mins
- Ian Madigan [21]: 1+3 in 2009-10; 7+11 in 2010-11 | + 527 mins
- Eoin O’Malley [22]: 4+3 in 2009-10;17+3 in 2010-11 | + 1032 mins
- Fergus McFadden [24]: 10+6 in 2009-10; 20+8 in 2010-11 | +909 mins
- Dave Kearney [21]: 3+0 in 2009-10; 7+6 in 2010-11 | +499 mins
Schmidt didn’t bring a single one of those players to the squad with him. They were all in situ. He just started picking them. He did find particular value in two signings which had been made in the off-season prior to his arrival, however: Isaac Boss [30] played in 29 games [17+12], and Heinke van der Merwe [25] played in 31 [18+13].
Again, Schmidt brought his experience from the Top14 to bear. While the Heineken Cup switched to the Top14-style 8-man bench for the 2009-10 season, the Celtic League regulations still maintained a 7-man bench [and the Six Nations still had a 7-man bench in 2012 … yikes]. Though Vern Cotter was in command of the forwards at Clermont, Schmidt had obviously picked up a few details, namely that tiring front rowers led to spaces in defense, penalties at scrum-time and an increased likelihood of injury as the season wore on. Cian Healy went 70+ minutes 14 times in 2009-10 [including eight 80-minute efforts]; the following season, he went over 70 minutes just twice in 21 games.
Schmidt was not only the first coach of an Irish province to start utilising the possibilities of the second prop on the bench effectively, but the first to ‘rotate’ Irish starters on to the bench. Van der Merwe spelled Cian Healy brilliantly, making a one-two punch out of the loosehead position. Stan Wright’s ruptured Achilles meant that his season didn’t start until late February, but once he was fit to play he featured in 11 [5+6] of the 13 remaining games, and eased the heavy load on Mike Ross [8+13 in 2009-10; 22+5 in 2010-11|+ 926 mins]. Ross had fallen foul of Michael Cheika shortly after arriving at Leinster with a bad mistake against London Irish in the RDS and found himself on the wrong side of the Australian for the rest of the season; it should be said that his period in the bad books coincided with the best season of Wright’s career, when the big Cook Islander played both sides of the scrum and was a rampaging presence in the loose. However, the roundabout came back to Ross and he became the anchor in Schmidt’s scrum for the 2010-11 season.
Procedure, §2: Fast-Track and On-Track
The Mole has written dozens of times before about the need for provincial staff to have a plan for every player under their remit. Selection has to be the key element of this plan. Any dedicated supporter would love to sit in on just one selection meeting … certainly I would. It’s never going to happen. You’ve got to make do with what you can read between the lines from Bren Fanning or Peter O’Reilly. So it was with some fascination that The Mole read this snippet of information from The 42’s most recent question and answer session with Lancaster:
‘While Lancaster pushes for continuity in the team’s make-up, he credits head coach Leo Cullen with providing resistance to unchanged teams and combinations by bubbling names up from the depth chart to earn their shot in the matchday squad … “Leo does a brilliant job of giving other players opportunities. So we keep a freshness in the squad, keep a hunger in the squad… I can’t think of many occasions in my time here that we’ve put out the same team two or three weeks on the bounce. It rarely happens.”‘
Lancaster’s comments shine a sidelight on Leinster’s selection practices, and it’s arresting to see Cullen as the driver for the consistent turnover in teams and through-put of talent. Cullen tends to be a little sidelined by the media in favour of Lancaster when discussing Leinster’s recent and ongoing success, but the fact that he maintains the final say in selection means the value of his input has probably been under-represented.
It’s easy to think of Cullen and Lancaster operating firmly within the Director of Rugby [DOR] and Head Coach [HC] framework, but the situation is not as neat as that. The Mole has been struck at various times in the past by the fact that Lancaster has seen the absolute worst view rugby can offer a professional coach – failure with your national side, sacked by your union and blamed by a vengeful media – and has come out the other side of it scarred but sticking to his core principles and still open to new experiences. If pushed to say who was behind the continuous changes in selection, I would have put it on him … and I would have been wrong!
Cullen’s deliberate [in both senses of the word] promotion of these unheralded players is not motivated by chasing praise for selecting a younger player ahead of an older one. It’s not the excitement of seeing just how good a starlet like Garry Ringrose or James Ryan or Jordan Larmour or Caelan Doris is when thrown into the mix in a first grade game way ahead of schedule. It comes from a rational belief in the responsibilities delegated to the academy system to improve players through various strands and methods of development; it comes from having seen the players’ rate of progress as measured against both their age-grade peers and senior players in training; and it comes from the necessary realisation that not all players are going to be superstars, and that not all players need to be superstars. These are, in their way, procedural selections: they indicate how the Leinster system functions when the vagaries of individual talent and positional need are set at neutral values.
Procedure, §3: Game Of Thrones/League Of Windows
Most Irish rugby fans will have heard one provincial head coach or another reference ‘this window’ when discussing their team’s performance in a seasonal context post-match. Making sense of the concept is as easy as comparing a schedule with a calendar.
For example, Leinster’s first ‘window’ of the 2018-19 season ran all the way from Friday 31 August to Sunday 4th November: a match every weekend for 10 weeks in a row. They then had two weekends off before entering into the second window, another 10 game stretch – this one running from Friday 23rd November to Friday 25 January – and then another two weekends off.
The rigour of the system breaks down a little at this point, as the all-encompassing Six Nations brings itself to bear on the season. Following their two weekends off [2nd/3rd and 9th/10th of February], Leinster were back in the saddle for three weekends of rugby, and then had another two weekends off [9th/10th and 16th/17th of March]. Then it was six weeks in a row [in Leinster’s case, from the 22nd of March until the 27th April], with a week off before finals rugby in May. Obviously it’s not six weeks in a row for every team: only sixteen teams from the three leagues have European quarter-finals in which to compete, and [surprise] only eight make the semi-finals.
Leinster Schedule 2018-19 [click to embiggen]: the first half of the season is quite rational, but older and more powerful forces come into play with the Six Nations.
Procedure, §4: Procedural Drama
The Mole mentioned early in this article about how the procedure of the league had informed the culture of Leinster Rugby.
The ‘windows’ of the first half of the season provide a rational, if arduous, framework. It’s when you consider the league as stand-alone tournament that the procedural difficulties kick in for provincial coaches. Take the calendar as a base layer: the ‘window’ system is the first overlay, and the league schedule a second overlay. The introduction of South African teams and a long-haul ‘mini-tour’ to factor in provides a final overlay of organisational requirements. A cursory examination through that gauze shows all kinds of external factors bringing significant nuance to the season.
Procedurally the league is a season of stops and starts. There’s a run of six games from the start of September to mid-October – ‘Back to School’ rugby. Then the league halts for a couple of European games. Then there’s a collection of four games over a seven-week period which span the first and second ‘windows’ and are essentially run in tandem with the November test series. The matches are hit and miss in terms of direct scheduling conflicts with the internationals, but coaches are aware that they’re completely in the ha’penny place when it comes to their selection needs against the needs of the national side.
Then there’s the second fortnight of Heineken Cup games – another break in the league – and then into the Christmas/New Year interprovincial fixtures, a run of mid-winter derby games in front of big crowds. That’s the third run of league games, bang in the middle of the second ‘window’ of the season. The last fortnight of Heineken Cup pool games follows in mid-January, and then it’s back into the fourth course of the league, an eight-week run from late January through February and into mid-March in tandem with the Six Nations. This is an on-off period for everyone bar test players.
The fifth course of the league – Spring rugby through late March and April – is splintered by European knock-out games or rest weekends, depending on how competitive your team is.
Leinster headed Conference B last season on 76 points with a P21|W15|L5|D1 record, but the narrative behind the numbers is worth bearing in mind. The Blue Meanies qualified for their home semi-final as early as Round 17, clinching top spot in the conference by beating the Cheetahs in the RDS on the 1st March. After that game, their record ran P17|W15|L2|D0 [they’d lost away to the Scarlets in Round 2 in early September and then at the Christmas bunfight in Thomond ], an 88% win rate which is perhaps more reflective of the nature of their campaign than the 71% with which they actually ended their regular season.
Treviso were happy, Leinster weren’t particularly unhappy: it was the only regular season game they didn’t lose after they had tied up the Conference.
Over the course of the eight weeks following that win over the Cheetahs, Leinster had no fewer that four dud league fixtures to fulfil their regular season obligations, before they could restart the process of trying to win the tournament. They promptly went out and lost three out of four them, drawing at home to Treviso in Round 19.
But to be frank, those games had become as meaningful as pre-season friendlies … at least to one of the teams involved. In contrast to the previous 17 fixtures, winning those remaining four games was absolutely inconsequential to Leinster’s attempt to win the league. They had secured their home semi-final in that victory over the Cheetahs: all of a sudden the staff’s sophisticated consideration of the league as a shifting mass composed of a huge number of variable factors was entirely simplified. Most of those variables became irrelevant, and the importance of fixtures in Rounds 18-21 collapsed.
Having all that slack on the rope in the league meant that Cullen and Lancaster could concentrate on the European fixtures without having to sweat results in the intervening weeks. It limited drama. It meant that internationals were afforded extra recuperation time, and that high-value players didn’t need to be risked in less important matches. It allowed for extensive game-planning for the three knock-out fixtures, optimising the team’s chances in each.
The end-of-season stressors aren’t the number of games, or their adjacencies; in the abstract, the programme isn’t dissimilar from the start of the season. However, the games themselves are more heavily freighted with importance. Your own players are operating at the point where there instincts and reactions are honed, but their bodies are beginning to wear out; they’ve paid big mental and physical tolls at this stage of the season. The opposition teams are at their strongest [in terms of personnel – no holding back players for bigger days down the line] and most motivated, and there are more ‘better’ teams on the opposition side of the whitewash. In short, the matches are tougher. Anything that a coach can do to save unnecessary mental stress or physical wear-and-tear is an advantage.
Conclusion
The league is a stop-start and jerry-rigged entity that can underwhelm, frustrate and engage in equal measure. It doesn’t have the history, wealth, clarity, or national importance of the Top14 – or even the French league’s trans-channel junior, the Premiership – and has thus always had a public relations struggle for a sense of legitimacy. The fact that it has gone through a staggering number of iterations since its initial formation has been a hindrance to its widespread acceptance as a coherent competition.
With that said, its existence is vital to the existence of professional rugby in Ireland – more so than the adored Heineken Cup. Without a 6-to-9 game competition, the league would only become more important, with stronger teams picked more frequently; without a 21-to-24 game competition, it’s quite likely there would be no professional teams in Ireland.
Taking its structural import to the unions out of the equation, the league is still viable as an abstract competition: it’s difficult to win. The Pro12/14 has been won by four different teams in the last five years, and six different teams in the last ten. The Premiership has had the same number of winners over the longer period, but only two in the last five years [and Saracens have won four of them], while the Top14 has had a different winner in each of the last five seasons and [again] six winners over a ten-year period.
In their fourth season together at Leinster, Cullen and Lancaster have continued to refine their approach to the league, both as a testing ground for tactics and a proving ground for players. There is no sense of wilful experimentalism, or of playing an ideologically ‘pure’ brand of rugby; the ideas that are tested are ideas concerned with making Leinster a more threatening opponent, a more difficult match-up and a more competitive outfit. Their approach to selection balances progression against internal competition whilst taking into account the standard issues of playing time, depth, age profile and form. There’s no shortage of factors to take into account. The ability of the coaches to place these different factors within a hierarchical system, and their response time to changing conditions, marks them out as both the most nuanced and the most adventurous selectors in the Irish system.
Digging Like a Demented Mole 
Another absolutely fantastic article! Keep up the great work!
Truly phenomenal piece. Honestly it’s such a shame that such magnificent journalism and insight is essentially free. This coupled with your podcast shows that you guys are simply lightyears ahead of what most journalists are offering here.
I say this point as an avid Leinster fan and one in agreement with the concept of financial remuneration coming towards our province from losing young players. I can’t help but feel the population advantages for ‘The Big East’ is a much bigger factor than you outline in your piece. The population of Leinster is 2.4 million and its school game is far more professionally minded and resourced than the other provinces. The infrastructure built coupled with ultra professional approach by Blackrock, St Michael’s, Clongowes, Belvedere etc are streets ahead of the other provinces. This often is built through private donations tapping into a wealthy alumni base. The players in Leinster schools have access to a far ranging team of coaches, physics and nutritionists that would be the envy of many Championship and Pro D2 teams in England and France respectively. Concurrently these schools often compete exclusively in one sport whereas in Munster and Connacht split with GAA. Additionally many of their schools do away with a three year Leaving Cert cycle doing only fifth and sixth year and as such many of the players are younger and smaller upon arrival to Academy’s and Sub Academy’s.
I’m a huge Lancaster and Cullen fan and love what they’ve done but more and more I do empathize with rival fans whose player base is not as wide and deep as ours. I think this might be an inherent flaw in the financial remuneration argument. The future reality for Irish and Leinster rugby is that our club will continue to produce players and a quicker and more effective rate than other teams. Regrettably this means losing some along the way. The other provinces are simply not in yet capable of selecting and trusting their youth to the same extent as Leinster for the reasons outlined above.
Excellent article with very detailed research. I’m also a big fan of the word “embiggen”.
A bit like the rugby season I had to break up the article into “windows” in order to read it. It helped maintain a high consistent standard and I would recommend this approach to other followers.
When are you re launching the “Gin and Thornley” twitter account?
As always a superb piece!
excellent work
“Cullen’s plan for the Mullingar man (Conor O’Brien) was well-conceived and coherently mapped out…”
Not sure I agree with that bit. O’Brien got his chance while Tomane was injured for five months. No coach plans for their new signing to be injured for that length of time. O’Brien’s development in season 2018/2019 was more down to chance than design. He’s back stuck behind Tomane and getting minimal gametime now.
Brilliant stuff as ever…whenever a DM piece drops it really is a case of hold everything else I need to read this. Have to echo GirvaDelNorda here too, the quality of this relative to what passes as sports “journalism” from the suspect quality prose and opinions peddled in couple of notable national publications in particular is markedly superior. If I may be so bold as to use a Commitments analogy here to compare the podcasts vs these long form pieces to jazz vs soul…would love to see more!
Girva makes a great point around the unique nature of the schools competing in the Leinster Senior Cup as a feeder to the professional game nationwide. As a preparation for the elite levels of a high impact professional sport I think the only parallel that could be drawn with the late stages of the S is Nick Saban’s programme at the University of Alabama, which has had 10 players drafted in each of the last 2 NFL drafts, and is universally feted as the greatest sporting nursery in North America. By comparison the 2012 senior cup final between Michaels and Clongowes had no less than 9 players who have gone on to become successful professional rugby players, including a couple of internationals. Think about that. One third of the starters from a schools game now make their living from pro rugby in their mid-20s. Leaving aside the issue of whether 17 year olds who are notionally in full-time education should be this well-conditioned and skilled at rugby and some of the eh…other aspects that surround Dublin schools rugby from a purely sporting perspective having 5 or 6 schools with effectively pro level infrastructure is an incredible advantage to prospects with promising athletic ability based in the capital and whose parents have the means to send them to such venerable institutions, not to mention the province itself. Incidentally having not gone to a rugby school I was never more than mildly curious about the S but would watch on Setanta simply because as sporting spectacles go it is serious entertainment – the aforementioned 2012 final is one of the best games of anything I’ve ever seen, with the last 30 approaching State of Origin levels of intensity. But this concentration of playing resource potential by dint of population and wealth in Dublin means it simply has to be shared around the provinces in the interests of the national team despite the handwringing in some of the aforementioned publications when the likes of a Carbery makes a move and apparently contributes to the destruction of the ethos of the province or some other such nonsense. I can imagine Nucifora’s reaction to such ill-conceived sentiments…at the end of the day at a basic level it’s a professional sport and the provinces are the farm teams to the national squad Show. There is only one ethos – contributing to team Ireland because at the end of the day the Union’s income statement says so as Mole points out.
To the point of increasing the pool for the other provinces given they largely don’t draw from the S while the vast majority of pro players on the island will always come from the schools I do think that the current Dublin hegemony in Gaelic football and talk of tier two competitions presents a real opportunity for rugby to poach talented athletes in their mid teens who might otherwise stick to the GAA. There will always be a few outliers like Tadhg Furlong, Sean O’Brien, Denis Leamy types who as a result of a particular body shape will naturally gravitate towards rugby, 180cm+ guys who naturally weigh over 100kg before they ever pick up a barbell don’t really lend themselves to gaelic sports no matter what their level of athleticism and in the meritocracy of a professional sport talented rugby players from outside the pale can no longer be ignored by the alickadoos of old and so will get their chance. They remain very much in the minority though, as a nation we don’t produce many really big fast people. But I think to get away from just the “I realized when I was 15 that I was never going to play hurling for [insert county] so focused on rugby” type players and expand the pool there must be an opportunity to recruit more Robbie Henshaws or Conor O’Briens. If you think about those two for example, both of whom played minor football for Westmeath, and would likely be stellar senior players you could consider the following scenario: 1. The not so compelling proposition of being 25 years old playing senior for Westmeath and perennially have your arse handed to you in Croke Park by Dublin, or playing in a mickey mouse tier two championship all the while likely driving up and down from Dublin to Mullingar for training several times a week like a lunatic or 2. the potential utopian vision of living as a professional athlete contending for major trophies with any of the Irish provinces, with the chance to hit the real lucre of a central contract, sponsorship etc. if you turn out to be as good as a Henshaw for example. At worst you’ll get a scholarship to a decent university out of it. An appealing carrot to dangle in front of any talented teenager not from the top 3-4 GAA counties (where players are well looked after and might actually win something) in a targeted approach? Pitch a kid on forgetting about gaelic and focus on rugby for 3-4 years, promise a fast track through the club underage sides, and if it doesn’t work out the round ball will still be there in your early 20s. If I were a regional games dev officer for the IRFU I’d be scouring county U17 squads at least as well as the rugby clubs.
This is a very well written piece and provides a unique perspective as is the case with all the mole’s treatises (more please!) and podcasts. It is unbelievably though biased towards the Leinster viewpoint where the authors are no doubt residing.
If you are truly are going to ask from a first principles basis, what is best for Irish rugby then I think you would come up with a very different response to the success of Leinster Academy (the transfer pricing solution). I would first ask should Connacht have been a seven figure compensation for Robbie Henshaw when he was taken from them in 2016? Arguably, the only world class player that they have ever produced gets moved to our largest and most successful province as they are in a rebuilding phase under Leo Cullen. To attempt the same move today would not be rejected outright by every rugby fan.
The goal of a centralized system like the IRFU has to be to try to smooth out the peak and troughs and to do what is best for Irish rugby in general (the inability of the suits to do this has been duly noted by the club game withering on the vine for years). Right now, Leinster is a winning machine with excess talent that it cannot utilize. Continuing to feed the monster is bad for Irish rugby.
We should implement a draft system whereby every eligible 18 year old gets ranked and selected by a province based on positional need as well as its current standing. The benefits of this is that the player gets brought up in the province that they will play for and has a better association with that province. This is opposed to trying to make it in Leinster and not, then moving to another province and being seen as someone who did not make it in Leinster. John Cooney and Tadgh Beirne are too example of late developing talent who did not make it within that short academy development cycle but still had plenty of room to grow and develop given time. We are not England with its playing population, we cannot afford to wasting the elite players we do produce.
The last point I would make is that the Leinster Academy success is a more recent phenomenon. Leinster could get through the exceptional talent like a Kearney / Fitzgerald / Healy / Heaslip who basically came out of school at that elite level but there was plenty of others that they did a really poor job with. This is no longer the case and it is in a virtuous cycle matching the likes of Toulouse and Saracens without the budget.