Leinster-31 NG Dragons-19

FOURTEEN

This was a match that had something for each kind Leinster rugby observer…

(a) The “Glass Half Full” Leinster fan - Whatever way they are gotten, you cannot do better than five points on the Pro12 table, so these will be happy, especially given the five-day turnaround from the Zebre trip.

(b) The “Glass Half Empty” Leinster fan - six points down at home to the presumptive “worst” Welsh region going into the final quarter is bound to draw many a “harrumph” from this lot whatever way the match turns out.  It must be noted that they are no less fans than category (a), they just want the excuse to use fancy rugby-nerd phrases like “soft shoulders” and “hard yards”.

(c) The “Anyone But Leinster” rugby fan - No doubt they held some kind of dread that the reigning Pro12 champs were going to claw their way back somehow in the closing stages, but there’s nothing like a couple of quickly-awarded penalty tries plus a sending off thanks to an Irish TMO to give them cause for begrudgery!

Which am I you ask?  Ah sure that’d be tellin…but safe to say it isn’t (c)!

Despite all of the above, and not to mention the 50 total points and 6 tries, it was hardly the most thrilling of contests.  I felt the need to think outside the box with the writeup this week so I set myself a unique challenge.

Normally I scoff at articles on the internet which lead with headlines like “Seven Reasons You Shouldn’t Put Salt On Your Chips” or “Eight Reasons You Absolutely Should Put Salt On Your Chips” or even “Twelve Things We Learned From #Frannogate Other Than He’s An Eejit”. 

But this time, I’m going to be all “If ya can’t beat em…”

Here’s fourteen ways I found the number 14 played a part in this fixture.  Hopefully it will also give a decent account of the way it transpired.

1. The year - 2014 (duh)
2. The date - Valentine’s day Feb 14 (double duh)
3. The round - Leinster’s 14th match in the Pro12 regular season
4. The first score of the match came in the 14th minute as Ian Madigan’s penalty broke the deadlock.
5. 14 was the amount of phases Leinster seemed to go through before being stopped by the Dragons (by fair means or foul) in the first half, that is until (worthy man of the match) Jack McGrath bulldozed his way over the line from 5 metres out to help the halftime score of 10-3 reflect the possession and territory.
6. 14 was worn by Fergus McFadden, who led Leinster’s stats in metres gained but who’s most significant contribution came when forced to run towards his own line to recover a fly hack early in the second half.  He did well in recovery but shortly afterwards Madigan turned it over and the Dragons were well poised to seize the moment and put Ashley Smith over in the corner to make it 10-8 to the home side.
7. 14 seemed to be the amount of seconds Isaac Boss was on the pitch before the ball trickled out of a ruck through his legs and in almost a carbon copy of the first try the visitors pounced, only this time it was nippy scrum half Richie Rees who touched down.  14 could also be the amount of times TMO Kevin Beggs looked at replays to find a reason not to give the score, but there was none to be found and it was 10-13.
8. The vast majority of the penalties on the night went to Leinster, but 14 minutes into the second half Jason Tovey kicked one over to give the Dragons their biggest lead of the night (10-16) and make an upset appear a very real possibility.
9. Like I said, the vast majority of penalties on the night went to Leinster, and the vast majority of those came at scrum time, which led to the home side racking up a quick 14 points to restore their lead thanks to two pen tries.  Oddly enough in the lead up to the first one, the Dragons changed their hooker after the first reset…it was odd because in the first bind they seemed to have a rare upper hand.  In the second one they very much did not.
10. There were 14 minutes left on the clock when we got our second penalty try and all of a sudden it seemed like the bonus point try was going to be a piece of cake.  As it turned out we needed every one of those minutes.
11. This one may be a bit harsh, but I’d estimate the IQ of sub Dragons prop Francisco Chaparro was around the 14 mark when he chose to lift Isaac Boss and drill him shoulders-first into the ground, with the ball nowhere near.  Hopefully Boss is ok; it was every bit a red-card offence and thanks to the TMO it was brandished.
12. And so with the extra man Leinster pushed right to the very end and thanks to a innovative long scoop pass by makeshift scrum-half Ian Madigan from under the posts, Darren Hudson (on for Boss) was able to collect and go over the line for his second bonus-point clinching try in as many weeks, with Madigan providing a cracking touchline conversion.  That point brought Leinster’s Pro12 total for this calendar year to yes, you guessed it, 14.  Still very much in the hunt for a home semi.
13. Very hard to take too much out of this game for Leinster, at least not for the Toulon game in April.  The fact that the Dragons had to have 14 men on the park for all four of our tries is something of a concern I suppose, in that teams may feel they can make some hay from bullying us at the breakdown area and with a more favourable ref, perhaps get something from the game, as the Welsh region may feel they could have.
14. Finally, the real context to this match was the 14 days between Ireland’s victory over Wales and the Triple Crown decider at Twickenham.  Although the Dragons were far from pushovers, I can’t really see how Joe Schmidt could have gleaned any info on the form of those like Madigan, McFadden and Reddan who would have been out to impress him on the night, at least not enough to move anyone up the pecking order.

So there you have it.  Sorry if some of the associations were a tad sketchy, but at least I tried something different!  Back to the more conventional rugby blogging next week - or is that a contradiction in terms? JLP

Click here for post-match reactions on the HarpinOnRugby Facebook page

Also this weekend

Ulster P v P Scarlets

Connacht 11 - 7 Edinburgh

Cardiff Blues 20 - 27 Glasgow

Munster 36 - 8 Zebre

Ospreys 75 - 7 Benetton Treviso

	TEAM	PLD	PTS	W	PD	T	PF	TD
1	MUNSTER	14	53	12	150	36	359	22
2	LEINSTER	14	50	10	103	32	325	12
3	OSPREYS	14	45	9	142	39	375	22
4	GLASGOW	12	41	10	36	19	204	10
5	ULSTER	13	41	9	77	23	254	8
6	SCARLETS	13	28	5	-19	22	240	-3
7	NG DRAGONS	13	24	5	-13	17	228	-2
8	EDINBURGH	12	23	5	-57	19	209	-9
9	CARDIFF BLUES	14	23	4	-82	17	273	-16
10	TREVISO	13	19	3	-95	19	238	-21
11	CONNACHT	14	17	3	-105	15	182	-10
12	ZEBRE	14	14	2	-137	20	212	-13

 

Next round

 

Thu Feb 20

 

Cardiff Blues v Leinster

 

Sat Feb 22

 

Scarlets v Edinburgh

 

Sun Feb 23

 

Treviso v Ulster

 

Dragons v Glasgow

 

Ospreys v Munster

 

Zebre v Connacht

NG Dragons-19 Leinster-23

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BEST OF A BAD LOT

If you told me after fulltime on Friday that this was to be the most entertaining rugby match I’d see all weekend I would have laughed, but sadly it was.

Even with my bluest of blue goggles on I have to say the Dragons lost this more than Leinster won it, and while technically speaking it was basic handling errors that cost them, I feel they had a wider problem in that they paid their visitors too much respect, as though they were playing the three stars over our crest instead of the players we actually had out on the park.

And this was just the kind of match where they would have needed the most from their two acquisitions from Edinburgh over the off-season…Netani Talei’s remit at Rodney Parade was surely to minimize the loss of Faletau to the squad around international windows, while Richie Rees brings much experience to the key number 9 position.  Sadly for the home side Talei didn’t have it on the night while Rees, who definitely did, was inexplicably substituted with a four-point lead to defend and more than 20m left on the clock.

Let us first examine how that lead came about.  The first quarter was one of total dominance by Leinster when we found some remarkably innovative ways of denying ourselves points on the scoreboard…a crooked feed here, a high pass there, but best of the bunch was Shane Jennings failing to hear the ref shout “use it” in a maul situation with the Dragons tryline within touching distance…not altogether his fault as his scrumhalf John Cooney was too busy getting Martin Moore out of the way to inform his skipper, but nonetheless a basic communication error that really shouldn’t happen at this level.

But like I said it wasn’t the only way we were misfiring going forward, and while we did have a bit of bad luck when Noel Reid’s toe grazed a blade of white grass on the touchline before Gopperth got the ball down on 27 minutes, the fact that Matt O’Connor’s side once more struggled to make the most of trips into the 22 means he will have to start switching his priorities from defence to attack before the season-defining back-to-back series with Northampton in December.

Still, it has to be said that his focus on the defensive side has been a major factor in what has, from the results side of things anyway, been an impressive start to the season for Leinster’s much-changed setup.

The only way the Dragons got over our line was by taking a quick tap (possibly further away & ahead of the mark than it should have been) and shipping the ball out wide with pacy runs and accurate offloads before centre Ross Wardle crossed the Leinster line.  Perhaps Lote Tuqiri’s positioning for the break didn’t help matters, but over the 80 minutes it was more of an exception to our defence rather than a rule.

For the most part while the Men of Gwent were racking up the handling errors, in many cases it was down to smart tackling from Leinster and in the final quarter in particular there were excellent smother tackles from Reid and Macken plus a “where do you think YOU’RE going?” head-on stop from Tadhg Furlong which kept the home side at bay.

What we needed to get ourselves back ahead on the scoreboard was the home side shooting themselves in the foot, and not for the first time this season, they obliged when lock Adam “not the hair bear” Jones lost all sense of reason on an attacking Leinster lineout and drove one of Dominic Ryan’s lifters out from under him, an extremely dangerous play that even the Rodney Parade boo-boys couldn’t justify.

Luckily for Leinster they were able to make hay as the sun shone with two tries in that 10-minute spell, one from the forwards as Aaron Dundon deservedly got over the line and then Noel Reid finished off a clever move set-up in midfield by Jennings and Kirchner exploiting the gap made by the extra man.

Before I get to the drama at the end, a word or six about the referee Peter Fitzgibbon.  It was said around social media afterwards that he had a good performance, I wonder if that is entirely true.

One of the things we want from a ref is “consistency”, I can’t argue there.  But it is only ONE of the things.  It’s just a gut feeling from me, but I think Fitzgibbon was TOO mindful of that on the night and this affected the overall flow of the game.  And that’s not entirely his fault either - I have been harping on for years about the insanity in a league with four nations using Irish & Welsh officials in clashes between provinces and regions.  Also to be fair to him, he wasn’t down to be the ref on the night as John Lacey cried off.

A case in point was the yellow card.  The way he went over to his assistant Ian Davies and practically stuck his microphone into the man’s face so everyone could hear a Welsh accent hear his recommendation of yellow card was almost laughable.  But there were other times as well when the ref seemed to find himself swaying from being selective with his calls on the one hand while feeling the need to “be consistent” on the other.  All I want from a ref is to be allowed to officiate on what he sees in front of him and the good ones are those who manage it.

Unfortunately for Fitzgibbon his eagerness to appear impartial was to go unrewarded as he was faced with the most important decisions of the match in the final series of plays that really should have resulted in a home win.

First we had this week’s Leinster Brainfart Supreme, this time by Jack O’Connor.  A little too eager to be involved in our defensive effort, he reached forward while off his feet and swatted the ball away from the replacement Dragons scrumhalf, nowhere near as dangerous as the earlier binning but every bit as justified a yellow.

Then we proceeded to hold them out before John Cooney inexplicably chose a box-kick at midfield - it landed outside the Dragons 22 but thanks to a mis-read of the blocking by Brendan Macken the Dragons were able to get all the way into our own where Luke Fitzgerald did well to get the result of a 5m scrum to the home side.  [Luckily for us it wasn’t Tuqiri and his dodgy leg doing the chasing at that point!]

And so there we were.  Five metre scrum to the Dragons who had an extra man, three minutes on the clock so enough time to get the match-winning score, even if Leinster did stall.  The referee would have to make a decision at some stage.  After one reset, he awards a pen to the Dragons - they take a quick tap and go over but he calls it back, ironically because it wasn’t from the mark!

Then they take another scrum but this time Leinster held it up and John Cooney made amends by taking full advantage of Talei’s hesitation at the base of the scrum and the Dragons couldn’t regroup before we won the ball back to secure the four points.

BBC Wales gave man-of-the match to Rhys Ruddock, and it is true he had a solid shift.  But despite Leinster’s problems going forward, there were some decent enough individual displays without anything breathtaking - Michael Bent may have found a new lease of life for himself as a back-up loose head prop, Zane Kirchner was solid on his first full 80 minutes and Darragh Fanning on the wing continues to have positive involvement in the action.

Overall, Matt O’Connor’s Leinster are still very much a work in progress and will need every bit of the time off before their next engagement in Treviso.  But given those problems, I’d say any other team in Europe would be more than happy with the points they have managed to put in the bag in both competitions up to now.

You certainly won’t find me going too hard on this coaching regime until I see how they play in Franklin’s Gardens. JLP

ALSO THIS WEEKEND

Edinburgh 25 - 23 Zebre

Cardiff Blues 17 - 13 Benetton Treviso

Connacht 12 - 19 Glasgow

Scarlets 17 - 9 Ulster

Munster 12 - 6 Ospreys

	TEAM	PLD	PTS	W	PD	T	PF	TD
1	MUNSTER*	7	26	6	54	16	163	10
2	GLASGOW*	7	25	6	26	10	113	7
3	OSPREYS*	7	23	4	67	20	198	11
4	LEINSTER*	7	22	4	34	15	165	5
5	ULSTER*	7	20	4	38	13	136	7
6	NG DRAGONS	7	14	3	-7	9	126	-3
7	CARDIFF BLUES	7	14	3	-12	9	148	-6
8	EDINBURGH	7	12	3	-63	9	115	-11
9	SCARLETS	7	12	2	-6	8	111	-3
10	TREVISO*	7	11	2	-21	9	120	-7
11	ZEBRE	7	8	1	-58	12	130	-6
12	CONNACHT	7	6	1	-60	8	96	-5

* = in HCup qualification spot under proposed new format

 

Next fixtures  Nov 22-24

Fri 22 Ulster v Edinburgh, Ravenhill, 19:05

Fri 22 Glasgow v Dragons, Scotstoun Stadium, 19:35

Sat 23 Ospreys v Zebre, Liberty Stadium, 14:30

Sat 23 Connacht v Scarlets, Galway Sportsground, 17:00

Sat 23 Cardiff Blues v Munster, Cardiff Arms Park, 18:30

Sun 24 Benetton Treviso v Leinster, Stadio Comunale di Monigo, 14:00

NG Dragons-19 Leinster-26

NOTHING TO SEE HERE

I understand footage does actually exist of this match...a try or two made it onto RTE's coverage of Saturday evening's Munster/Ospreys clash, and I dare say they will also appear on tonight's Against the Head.

When it comes to the lack of TV coverage I know I have a tendency to harp on it whenever Leinster lose out, but I still need to point out that if there's any kind of cameras at the ground, the broadcasters should have found a way to let us watch, at very least by tape delay.

I don't care if the footage isn't from a full OB unit...I don't care if it's someone with a shaky hand holding their iPhone...there are over 14,000 Leinster season tickets holders so it's safe to say that number would be interested in watching them play, which means that number of eyes would get to see the RaboDirect, Bank of Ireland & Specsavers logos on the jerseys for an hour and a half, so somebody somewhere needs to sort this out for the future.

Anyway...back to the rugby...thanks to the regular tweeting of the official Leinster account as well as fans like @BarMcHugh, we got a decent sense of what was going on as we flicked back and forth between the Ulster & Connacht games on Friday evening.

Early on it seemed as though we were heading for a scoreline similar to Glasgow's at the same venue a couple of weeks ago, with a brace of Sean Cronin tries in the first 8 minutes followed by one from Kearney the Younger giving us a 19-3 lead after the first quarter.

But the bonus point try was to prove tough to get as the Dragons pushed us back, which of course was a good thing for the home fans and was the game entered its final 20 minutes and the score poised at 14-19 as it was, we Leinster fans were anxiously refreshing our twitter feeds more concerned with the mere win than the bonus point before finally the news came through of Dave Kearney's second.

The reports on Ian Madigan's display have been mixed...seemingly yet another penalty kick from his hand failed to find touch and he got mowed over by a Dragons lock at one point...but then again Paddy Jackson had a mistake or two on the night at Ravenhill and still got man of the match even though his team threw away the win, so it's probably all relative.

And there are some who would moan about the fact we conceded a late try to give the home side a losing bonus point...but by all accounts they deserved it for their display and what's more we had the full five points in the bag ourselves so it really shouldn't be of too much concern. I wouldn't be averse to a switch to the Top14 system, however, of the try bonus only being awarded to a team if they score three more than their opponents.

So where does that leave the Pro12 table now? Well Leinster sit in 3^rd place, which ironically is where we were back on December 21^st before we played Ulster in Ravenhill. But although defeat that evening dropped us to fifth at the halfway stage of the regular season, we have gone on since then to take 28 points out of a possible 30 to cut our margin behind the league leaders from 16 to just 2, with both teams above us set to visit the RDS in the next two rounds.

Nothing is certain of course, but certainly compared to where we were at Christmas Leinster's chances of silverware look a lot better now than they did at the turn of the year.

One minor point I'd like to make about the Pro12 table as it stands...since Glasgow and Ulster are level on points and “number of wins” is the first tie-breaker, I reckon the Ulstermen should be in first place because they have drawn one and thus have a better record. I blogged about this last summer – hopefully it doesn't cost someone a home semifinal or worse a place in the playoffs in May.

Now the Pro12 takes a two-week break while the Six Nations comes to a close, and last night Ireland announced an extended squad which included 15 from Leinster. If you add the RDS-bound Mike McCarthy and the injured Kevin McLaughlin you can actually make a full rugby team from those players which is a good sign.

Of course most of the water-cooler chat this morning is about the lack of Ronan O'Gara's name from the squad...depending on your source he has been everything from “left out” to “axed” by Declan Kidney. In some ways, taking him & Tom Court out of the squad can be construed as making them scapegoats for what happened in Murrayfield, but I'm pretty sure most rugby observers have the intelligence to see beyond that.

First, to deal with the O'Gara issue, the only thing more annoying than the few “deROGatory” online comments was the amount of his “defenders” highlighting them as if they were some overall representation of how non-Munster fans felt about him. As with any other issue, most people's views exist in the middle ground...his achievements in the game can never be called into question but his recent form is well short of what it was and the time has come for others to stake their claim in the national, and possibly even the Munster teams for the future.

This announcement may fall short of the clarification on Kidney's future I was calling for after the Scotland game (England one too actually), but since we were repeatedly told that ROG's inclusion in the squad was necessary because we “needed the win”, we have to assume the reverse is also true.

I wouldn't expect too many new names to be in Kidney's next matchday 23...we mustn't forget there are Lions spots still up for grabs...but should the likes of Sexton not be fit for next weekend it will certainly be heartening to see more youngsters in green ready to show what they can do at the highest level. Perhaps I should add that I would be totally in favour of Jackson retaining his starting position.

As for Kidney himself, with O'Gara making all the headlines the spotlight certainly seems to have gone off him somewhat...whether that's by accident or design we'll probably never know.

Still...once more I will be a lot more concerned with his team's performance on the pitch next weekend than with the actual selection of individual players – the winless French will be up for an 80-minute battle so it remains to be seen whether we can give them one. JLP

Also last weekend…

Scarlets 14 - 13 Edinburgh

Ulster 29 - 29 Benetton Treviso

Glasgow 29 - 13 Cardiff Blues

Connacht 23 - 19 Zebre

Munster 13 - 13 Ospreys

NG Dragons-30 Leinster-14

MEN OF GWENT, BOYS OF LEINSTER

No disrespect to the Dragons, but it has to be said; on most rugby weekends Leinster’s loss in Newport would look a lot worse on paper than did Munster’s in Swansea to the Ospreys.

This week, however, there’s a levelling factor…the teams the two Irish provinces sent to Wales.

I sounded like an owl when I read Leinster’s team-sheet…after every name saying “Who?” but it was clear what Michael Cheika’s motives were – having lost Jonny Ten for the crucial home-and-away series with the Scarlets in the Heineken Cup, he saw the points at Rodney Parade as expendable so he could wrap the rest of his first team in several layers of cotton wool.

So there’s no real point in getting technical about the gaping holes in Leinster’s defence in the first half of this encounter…not only had they not played competitively together before, they are unlikely to do so again anytime soon, even for the ‘A’ side, so we can chalk this game in the ‘experience gained’ column and take refuge in that we’re the only Irish team in the top four so we can focus on the Heineken Cup knowing we still have some eggs in the Magners basket for later in the year.

Not a whole lot you can say about the actual performance of the lads…I sat through the whole thing and I think everyone made mistakes even the seniors like Jackman and O’Kelly, but at least they won the second half 8-6 I suppose!

But the eating that will prove this pudding that Cheika has created won’t come till next week when we see how our strong 1st XV perform at Parc y Scarlets. Should be quite the contest, and hopefully our weakness at backup outhalf won’t be cruelly exposed.

LEINSTER:

15: Niall Morris (Ian Madigan, 48)
14: David Kearney
13: Eoin O'Malley
12: Fergus McFadden
11: Simon Keogh
10: Ian McKinley (Michael Keating, 70)
9: Chris Keane (Paul O'Donohoe, 59)

1: Ronan McCormack (Mike Ross, 48)
2: Bernard Jackman CAPTAIN
3: CJ van der Linde (Ronan McCormack, 73)
4: Devin Toner
5: Malcolm O'Kelly (Trevor Hogan, 67)
6: Rhys Ruddock
7: Dominic Ryan (Paul Ryan, 56)
8: Stephen Keogh

REPLACEMENT NOT USED: Richardt Strauss