IT WAS BACK to the grindstone for Leinster at their UCD training ground today after their earliest exit from European competitions since 2008.
Since then, five seasons have ended almost exclusively in celebration as three Heineken Cups and an Amlin have been etched into a Leinster legacy.
It may be semi-final weekend before it really hits home that they are concerned with only one competition. For today at least, the focus could not be drawn away from the wreckage of the defeat in Toulon.
“Yeah, it wasn’t nice to watch that,” was Cian Healy’s short review of this morning’s video analysis. The prop had his boots in his hand ready to go into a new training week, but pushed just a little further, he said:
“We just went through what we needed to do. We’re all now at a level where we can see what we’re doing wrong and you can see you’re doing something you’re not supposed to.
“Matty was just pointing that out. He had a few clips pointing out what was wrong and it’s up to us to break it down and figure it out for this week.”
Putting a finger on one technical issue was close to impossible according to Healy and his head coach Matt O’Connor. Instead, the three-time winners feel that they just did not turn up the with intensity required to take down the champions on their own field.
“They beat us at the basics which was disappointing,” said O’Connor, ”they didn’t deceive us with anything. They didn’t bring anything to the table we didn’t know they were going to bring. We weren’t good enough on the day.
“It’s a wake-up call. The key thing is to make sure you learn the lessons. If you learn the lessons from Sunday, if you understood what their shortcomings were and you fixed them, then there is a positive in it. It gives us really good clarity.”
That clarity does not stretch into the past, however. Healy dismissed the notion that efforts in the Six Nations could have sapped a considerable portion of their energy stocks, and save for a disappointing session seven days ago the prop struggled to pinpoint why the starting XV had been as flat as they were in France.
“Everyone was feeling pretty good. It was a decent week of training. Tuesday was bad, 50% of it bad and 50 was good. Then later in the week it got better and it was very sharp. We were in a good place going down there it was just that it didn’t click for us.
Poaches
“It’s not something we’d worry about. We’re upset about it, it’s put us out of Europe, but we’re pretty positive after coming out of the meetings about what we have to do going forward to do well in this league.
“They did exactly what we thought they were going to do. They came at us and beat us up and it worked. We didn’t do the job on [Steffon] Armitage and he got a lot of poaches. We let ourselves down with intensity at ruck and accuracy – we just weren’t on the ball.”
The inherent promise is that Leinster’s supporters can bank on a massive positive reaction when the eastern province take on Ospreys this Friday. But as the dust clears from all the hurt and head-scratching that arises from a European exit it’s worth remembering that O’Connor’s squad have a five-day turnaround before taking on one of their most fierce rivals.
It’s tough at the top, especially without a distraction to stop you from looking down.
