Leinster-9 Northampton-18

Win a hoody from new rugby streetwear brand No Scrum No Win in our latest “unriggable raffle” competition, click the logo for details

…AND THE SAINTS TAKETH AWAY

Pity I used the “Where’s Waldouck?” headline for last week’s writeup because it would have probably been even more appropriate for this match considering who was at 13 for Northampton, but never mind - I see my role here as not to write clever headlines but rather to provide some context which the mainstream media seems to have overlooked.

Why they have overlooked it is for another day’s debate, though my first suggestion would be out of delight that Leinster have proven themselves to be mortal in this competition after last week’s display because if they continued at that level there would be precious few who could stay with them.

I have attempted to break it down into five headings.

1. NORTHAMPTON - FROM POOR TO GOOD

“Not only do the dogs in the street know Northampton are going to go for it this weekend, so do the fleas on the dogs in the street. The only question is how.” 

In my preview I pointed out that the Saints were going to have to do something different, and after shifting Samu Manoa to number 8 and George North to 13 I wonder should Mallinder be praised for making the switches or questioned for not doing it last week.

Either way, on Saturday the Saints had a powerful centre who was able to finish when there was a sniff of the line, as well as extra aggression in the back row which, no offence to Shane Jennings, more than tipped the scales in the visitor’s favour when Sean O’Brien was ruled out.

Side note on North - if he goes on to succeed for Wales at 13, particularly in the 2014 Six Nations, it will always be Mallinder who should take the credit as he could have easily been tried there in November and Mr Gatland will have more question marks over him concerning an outside centre ;-)

Anyway…the context I provide here is to haul back the Sky-perbole from Messrs Harrison & Barnes who made it out as though this was some sort of epic display.  What Northampton did was raise their levels up and beyond where they should have been last week, and although they did make several errors themselves, their biggest achievement, which was thwarting Leinster’s offence by fair means or foul, is what got them the victory.

For the record I felt the Saints’ biggest error was by Kahn Fotuali’i - with less than two minutes left on the clock and a penalty advantage in his favour, his decision to take a drop goal was pure madness…if he deliberately kicked it wide it would have been genius, but since the pen was under the posts they could have wasted a ton of gameclock with the easy placekick and as things turned out it very nearly cost them.

2. LEINSTER - FROM AWESOME TO AVERAGE

In the whole “Mads or Gopps” debate among Leinster fans, gun to my head I’m on Team Madigan, but that doesn’t mean that he should get a free ride.  Leinster scored 6 tries last week and could have had a few more, with Ian a big part of that display.

But when it gets past the 60th minute and we have been denied again and again going forward in a crucial Heineken Cup fixture, it isn’t the time to be thinking about who is getting gametime to prepare for test matches which are two months away.  The Saints had made the correct adjustments to their defence, so we needed to do something different, yet we kept doing the same things expecting them to click.

Plus, though I will deal with the referee more closely in the next point, we need to be able to cope with an official who is allowing so little time for the tackled player to present the ball - Garces (for the first 70 minutes anyway) approached this area much the same as it was when we played Connacht back in October, when it was also Madigan starting and we also found it hard to get going offensively.

This isn’t a Leinster failing that is peculiar to Matt O’Connor, by the way, but since we’re focusing on this match I reckon it was screaming for Gopperth to be brought on - sure, it wouldn’t have been great for Madigan’s confidence but the way I see it winning the match comes first, especially in this competition.

As for the pack, we were bossed at the breakdown and sadly I have to look at Shane Jennings.  He had been on flying form ahead of his injury but I wonder was he ready for what needed to be a massive 60-minute shift.  I’m thinking Dominic Ryan & Jordi Murphy should be getting some serious game time over Christmas with a view to having them challenging for the January fixtures.

Last but not least, Cian Healy’s absence didn’t hurt us because of Jack McGrath replacing him, rather it did because it meant Michael Bent was needed for a 20-minute stint at a level I don’t think he’s able for.

But anyway…the point is, I want to make it clear before I deal with the refereeing that I am well aware that Leinster were way below the standards that put the three stars on their jersey.  And as an aside, Madigan’s tackle of North was quality and deserves a mention…my points above were on his general quarterbacking.

3. THE REFEREEING

Good Lord - where do I begin?  Please remember before I go on that I have made it clear that Northampton deserved the win, but the fact remains there were several glaring inconsistencies that played a part in thwarting the offence almost as much as the visitors did.

Worst call of the night was in the above screengrab.  Garces is blowing for a penalty and says it is for “not releasing after the tackle”.  What is interesting about this is that it was actually Brian O’Driscoll who made the tackle, and as you can see he has long since released Saints number 7 Tom Wood - it is Eoin Reddan who gets pinged even though he is on his feet - the reason he ignored Garces’ call of “release!” was because he knew he wasn’t the tackler.

For the first 70 minutes of the match Garces penalised both sides if they held the ball for a fraction of a second after being tackled.  Therefore this should have been a pen to Leinster.

But the inconsistencies did not begin nor end there.  At the start of the second half a Lee Dickson fumble from the kickoff saw Leinster pummelling the Saints line.  Garces found penalty after penalty as the visitors did everything they could, both legal and illegal, to stop us but all we got out of it was a three-pointer - not so much as a warning afterwards to skipper Dylan Hartley.

To be fair in a way, in the passage of play leading to the Fotuali’i drop goal, the ref didn’t warn us either after finding several penalties on our part, but how he didn’t see one in that final frantic spell as the clock went red, I will never know.  All the greatest hits were there - in from the side, hands on the ball, beyond the last foot, even not releasing after the tackle.

Again, there are no guarantees we would have gotten the match-winning try had a penalty been called.  BUT - we absolutely must NOT fault Jamie Heaslip for dropping the ball when he did.  It was his quick tap and charge down the pitch which was reminiscent of his Grand Slam 2009 form that set up the chance in the first place. 

The fact remains, the series of phases should not have gone that far and we should have at the very least had the option of going for a penalty try, assuming the ref had actually left his cards back in France.

4. THE BOOING

Stu Barnes suggested Dylan Hartley was substituted because he had given everything.  He didn’t have a bad game alright, but I reckon he was taken off before he got himself sent to the line.  He had just conceded a blatant pen as we had good attacking ball and if the ref had issued a warning earlier as I mentioned, we could have had a man advantage for that last spell.

The reason I mention that here is that the booing started when Hartley’s not-so-pretty mug appeared on the big screen just as Stephen Myler was lining up a penalty kick.  Sadly when we have a crowd as big as this one there are those who just don’t “get” the game of rugby and while those who booed the sight of Hartley may have stopped, others misunderstood it and carried it on through the kick, which is of course inexcusable. 

But to those who used that incident to take a pop at Leinster fans in particular, a resounding boo to you.  It is has been a blight right throughout the sport since it went pro and anyone who says they never hear it at their own ground is either selectively deaf or blatantly lying.  At smaller grounds it is easier to stamp out, but it still happens and in this age of spiralling wages we unfortunately need every 40k+ crowd we can get.

What can we do about it?  Short of pro-active “please respect the kicker” announcements at the beginning of every half, I’m not so sure.  But on behalf of the tens of thousands of genuine Leinster rugby fans, apologies to the Saints for that particular incident.

5. HOW POOL ONE STANDS

One year ago we got a late try that pinched a losing bonus against Clérmont  - this time around, we had it taken away by Elliot’s opportunist sprint down the field.  We may have played below our usual standards, but we did not deserve that.

Still…does this mean it’s armageddon in Pool One for Leinster?  Absolutely not.  Not only would we have taken a 5-4 match point win in this back-to-back series when the draw was made, we would have offered a couple of limbs to go into round 5 with a 4 point lead atop the pool.

But since the media are so keen to remind us that the Saints did to us what they did to Ulster last season, maybe I should offer another Northampton stat for reference…in the 2010/11 campaign, they won all their pool games which meant nothing in that second half in Cardiff, so losing a pool match, even one at home, is not the end of the road for Leinster.

So don’t go ruling us out just yet.  JLP

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

Also this weekend

Heineken Cup

Glasgow 7 - 9 Cardiff Blues

Ospreys 21 - 12 Castres

Benetton Treviso 3 - 35 Ulster

Toulon 32 - 20 Exeter Chiefs

Saracens 64 - 3 Zebre

Perpignan 17 - 18 Munster

Scarlets 13 - 31 Clermont Auvergne

Connacht 9 - 37 Toulouse

Harlequins 17 - 3 Racing Metro

Gloucester Rugby 10 - 16 Edinburgh

Montpellier 14 - 15 Leicester Tigers

POOL ONE	PLD	W	D	L	F	A	BP	PTS
LEINSTER	4	3	0	1	87	41	1	13
NORTHAMPTON	4	2	0	2	65	64	1	9
CASTRES	4	2	0	2	53	63	0	8
OSPREYS	4	1	0	3	55	73	1	5

British & Irish Cup

Cross Keys 14 - 30 Leinster A

POOL ONE	PLD	W	D	L	F	A	BP	PTS
LEINSTER A	4	4	0	0	134	44	3	19
CROSS KEYS	4	2	0	2	58	92	1	9
MOSELEY	4	1	0	3	84	75	3	7
EALING TRAILFINDERS	4	1	0	3	54	119	0	4

Northampton-7 Leinster-40

Win golf and lunch for 4 people at the fabulous Luttrellstown Castle Golf & Country Club in the latest HarpinOnRugby “unriggable raffle” click the logo below for details

WHERE’S WALDOUCK?

“Northampton have been blowing teams away here at the Gardens” - Stu Barnes

“By the fulltime whistle, one of these two could have the other one by the throat” - Myles Harrison

Sky’s grip on covering Europe’s top club rugby tournament may be slipping, but that won’t stop their commentators doing everything they can to set the right tone before matches.  As you can see by the above statements, both shortly before kickoff, they thought this one would be a lot closer.  To be fair, so did pretty much everyone, with even the bookies shading it to the home side.

In fact, another thing Sky pointed out pre-match was just how much the 2011 final defeat in Cardiff meant to the Northampton players, and how determined they were to gain revenge.  Unfortunately for them, Matt O’Connor’s men had similar but much more recent disappointment they wanted to put behind them, and boy, did they get it done.

My choice of headline may seem a bit cruel as the result was certainly not down to one player on the Saints side (not even makeshift full-back Ken Pisi who made costly early blunders), but what I do intend to highlight with it is just how much Brian O’Driscoll thoroughly deserved his “man of the match” award.  For while every Leinster player out-played their opposite number on the day, I reckon I only heard Saints’ outside centre Dominic Waldouck’s name mentioned three times throughout the match, with the last one being his gift which BOD didn’t so much inter-cept as ac-cept to provide try number 5.

It would be an easy choice to give MotM to Luke Fitzgerald for his hat-trick, and to be sure, all were superb finishes - but to analyse this match properly I reckon you have to look at the first half an hour when ironically Leinster built a 19-0 lead just as Ireland had done against the All Blacks.  And at the core of everything positive for the visitors during that time was Mr “One More Year” himself.

Of course it wasn’t as if he was doing everything on his own…to a man Leinster were pummeling the gainline both with and without the ball and this was the difference between the two sides throughout, it’s just when that extra bit of skill was needed, BOD stepped up - first, with a deft kick though for Luke to finish, then with what is becoming a trademark “through the legs” pass (it was the only thing he could have done at that moment to keep the ball moving but how he even thought to try it I’ll never know) and most importantly, when the Saints finally managed to get some possession in our 22, a killer turnover that really must have knocked the stuffing out of them.

See, strange as it may seem to say it (if not arrogant), Leinster were far from perfect, especially at the set piece.  Darts were going awry, and more worrying for me, our plan to push not hook on our own scrum put-in is reducing our chances of getting the ball back to around 50/50, a tactic which surely won’t bear much fruit in the knockout stages in April should we get that far.

Fortunately enough for us on this occasion, we were so focused in open play that even when we did give up the ball it wasn’t long before we won it back.  The only way the Saints got on the board at all was from quick thinking by their best player on the night Lee Dickson, just after we had Michael Bent shown a yellow with the result long since decided.

And as if to add insult to injury, even without that 15th player we still managed to cross the line for try number 6 thanks to the running of D’Arcy, the offloading of Kirchner and the support play of Fitzgerald, all top notch.

But if I were to harp on all six Leinster tries fully, this writeup would become a novel so I will focus on my pick of the bunch, that being number 3, because it involved so many different players and required pinpoint precision at every turn.

Ian Madigan had just kicked a shocker of a penalty but much like every other Leinster error on the day, we quickly made up for it.  Having gotten possession in our own half there were carries by D’Arcy, McCarthy, BOD and Dave Kearney, all of which made mincemeat of the gainline.  Eoin Reddan has had a few off days this season but for him to be effective he must have a steady supply of front foot ball and it was overflowing for him at Franklin’s Gardens.

Then it was time for Rhys Ruddock to get involved.  Leinster’s player of the season so far in my book for sheer consistency of performance, he wasn’t on that pitch to make up the numbers nor stand in for Kevin McLaughlin - he was there by right and when he got the ball in this sequence he had the presence of mind not only to throw a dummy and surge forward, but also to supply a perfect offload for the supporting Sean O’Brien.  Now we were in the Saints 22.

Up steps Reddan again to start the next phase, and as the Saints were still scrambling it was time to send it out the backs.  Reddan to Madigan…Madigan to Cronin (why WOULDN’T he be lining out at inside centre?)…Cronin back to Madigan on the wraparound as D’Arcy threw a block (legal of course) then we have an overlap outside as Madigan feeds it to Rob Kearney who glides through tackles to put in his skipper Jamie Heaslip and the number 8 (who hopefully will still be at the RDS next season but we’ll have to see) and was even "on the ball" enough to touch down closer to the posts.

After the BOD try I was given a challenge by a twitter follower to avoid using certain words in this writeup…it hasn’t been easy!!!

One try I’m not going to use superlatives for is our fourth…it was a good finish by Reddan but I reckon Rob K was offside when Madigan put up the bomb from his free kick and his recovery of said kick led to the score.  Still though…since we got another five and could even afford to butcher two more early in the second half, I’m not sure it would have made too much difference to the result!

It was overall one of those European performances by the three-time champions which Matt O’Connor can add to the one in Swansea and this time, the original “Leinstertainment” factor was well and truly back.  His opposite number Jim Mallinder knows how to turn his side around in between these “back-to-back” encounters but if they don’t get any traction in the opening quarter at the Aviva next Saturday, the outcome could be similar.

Special mention must go to the Leinster faithful in the ground…sadly I couldn’t be one of them as I was “minding the fort” back home checking out the next crop of talent at the province but from my vantage point in Sinnotts downtown the sounds of “Come On You Boys In Blue” could be clearly heard and once again travelling Irish fans gave an excellent account of themselves.

As it turned out, it was a Grand Slam weekend for the Irish provinces - Ulster and Munster secured comfortable home bonus point wins as expected, but as everyone involved with Leinster basked in the glory of what they thought was their result of the weekend, along came Connacht to usurp us all at the 11th hour…I reckon we’re more than willing to let them take that crown and once I have had a chance to look back over their epic battle in Toulouse I will do a separate feature myself.

But this writeup is to deal with Leinster and now that we have played all three teams in this difficult pool and have three wins with two home matches to come, the challenge for us now is of course to remain focused and make sure we still don’t know where the likes of Waldouck are next week.  Maybe Matt should borrow a cliché from soccer after the first leg of European matches : “It’s only halftime!” JLP

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

Also this weekend

Cardiff Blues 29 - 20 Glasgow

Castres 15 - 9 Ospreys

Clermont Auvergne 32 - 11 Scarlets

Exeter Chiefs 9 - 14 Toulon

Zebre 10 - 39 Saracens

Racing Metro 8 - 32 Harlequins

Ulster 48 - 0 Benetton Treviso

Munster 36 - 8 Perpignan

Edinburgh 12 - 23 Gloucester Rugby

Leicester Tigers 41 - 32 Montpellier

Toulouse 14 - 16 Connacht

POOL ONE	PLD	W	D	L	F	A	BP	PTS
LEINSTER	3	3	0	0	78	23	1	13
CASTRES	3	2	0	1	41	41	0	8
NORTHAMPTON	3	1	0	2	47	75	1	5
OSPREYS	3	0	0	3	34	61	1	1

British & Irish Cup

Leinster A 31-0 Cross Keys

POOL ONE	PLD	W	D	L	F	A	BP	PTS
LEINSTER A	3	3	0	0	104	30	2	14
CROSS KEYS	3	2	0	1	44	62	1	9
MOSELEY	3	1	0	2	66	54	2	6
EALING TRAILFINDERS	3	0	0	3	33	101	0	0

Leinster-13 Northampton-21

[update Dec 11, 2013] Not often our archive feature looks back on such a recent contest, but the evolution of Matt O’Connor’s Leinster since the last time Northampton came to Dublin has been noticeable.  Not that anyone will be taking them for granted this Saturday, mind…

THE NUMBERS GAME

Rugby occasions in Donnybrook Stadium always fill me with nostalgia…the Leinster Schools Senior Cup matches, pretending to shove my mates out onto the Morehampton Road en route to the ground, piling into the Spar for Tayto crisps and Curly-Wurlys before the match, wolf-whistling at the girls who make excuses to walk back and forth in front of the stand during halftime…

…but enough about what I got up to last spring on the way to Blackrock College’s 67th cup victory…my job here is to tell you about Friday night’s experience so I’d better get on with it!

On paper this was a re-creation of the 2011 Heineken Cup final.  On the pitch it one team’s British & Irish Cup side against another’s full Aviva Premiership one.  It certainly was a strange feeling to be a Leinster fan watching your team play at home knowing you were the underdogs.

I reckon we got a first taste of Matt O’Connor’s ability to motivate the dressing room on Friday night.  When your team is bettered for ability & experience at virtually every position on the pitch (even Shane Jennings had his match opposite him in Phil Dowson) the best thing you can do is rally your troops and get them focused to hit their opponents right from the kickoff.

Goodness knows how many times we as Leinster fans have seen that done to us - we’re favoured by more than a try going into a contest and even though we eventually match or even better that spread by full-time, it’s often the visitors who open the scoring.  This is precisely what happened at Donnybrook last Friday.

I’d wager that you’d raise more than an eyebrow in the Northampton Saints camp if you told them that our starting scrumhalf on the night Luke McGrath was technically our fourth choice in that position.  Right from the off he was leading the way with speed in both hands and decision-making and after just five minutes Martin Moore was crashing over the line for the opening score after a series of well-orchestrated phases & mauls.

Then the few pre-match pints I had savoured in McCloskeys gave me the arrogance to show off to the people with me (and in turn no doubt to the annoyance of those around me) that I had been at Ravenhill the previous week and that Jimmy Gopperth was flawless from the kicking tee.  Cue the Kiwi putting his conversion wide.

And it was no surprise that the visitors were to come roaring back at us when they had a decent spell of possession themselves…again, we Leinster fans are used to the boot being on the other foot.

But there was something they may not have been counting on…the fifteen-headed blue monster that is the Leinster defence.

No matter how much success Joe Schmidt had at the RDS, you couldn’t expect Matt O’Connor or indeed anyone to arrive and just throw his hands up and say “well it ain’t broke, why fix it”.  Having played in the centre himself and been a successful backs coach at senior level you’d be surprised if he didn’t want to put his own stamp on the attacking side of things.

When the opposition have the ball, however, you can forgive him for letting the existing culture at the province prevail, and his charges showed on Friday that all seems to be well on that front.  The organisation, the resilience, the tough tackling, all still there even with third and sometimes fourth string players involved. 

You would think that if George North can throw Israel Folau over his shoulder then he would no doubt make light work of Darragh Fanning but the former Connacht player who himself spent time playing down in Oz was more than up for the challenge and as hard as the Saints tried to bring the former Scarlet into the action, he was snuffed out every time.

Then at one stage as the Saints were exerting pressure on the Leinster line it was great to see a fully-pumped Shane Jennings motivating his front row before the bind.  Martin Moore was up against another Lion in Alex Corbiseiro and Jenno suggested to the assistant ref that there was some jiggery-pokery going on…at the next scrum a pen was awarded to Leinster and Moore had his hair ruffled by half a dozen team-mates.  Altogether great news for everyone involved at the province going into the new season, with the possible exception of Michael Bent!

No doubt the Saints’ first Premiership opposition the Exeter Chiefs had a spy or two on hand and will have noted how hard Jim Mallinder’s side had to work for their scores.

Yet score they did and on 18 minutes it was the other tight-head prop Gareth Delman who went over, but that touch-down was to provide the visitors’ with their only first half points as Steven Myler missed the conversion and the Saints were thwarted for the rest of the period.  Gopperth popped over a pen to put the home side in the lead at half-time.

Then came the break, and the minis poured on to the pitch for their moments of glory, while the fans poured into the Bective and Wesley bars for their moments of refreshment. 

When the second half began, we had the visitors resuming their all-out assault, but it still took them a good ten minutes to break through as USA international Samu Manoa got the touchdown to put them in the lead for good.  This time Myler’s conversion was good and he added a pen shortly afterwards to make it 8-15. 

Now it was time to thoroughly confuse everyone watching.  I’m not sure it would have been a logistic nightmare for the two sides to number their jerseys up to 30 or so to ensure we had a notion who was on the pitch at different stages…instead we had Leinster players with no number at all while the Saints chose to just give subs a jersey with the same number as the guy who was on before him (for example my pint intake plus my failing eyesight meant it took a while to notice the number 11 was no longer North).

But thankfully the action was to last right to the very end for us at the Bective end of the grandstand as Leinster advanced down the field as the clock ticked down before young flanker Dan Leavy stretched out for a consolation try. 

Though he didn’t have the best outing as Gopperth’s replacement, fair play to Cathal Marsh for having the 7s-savvy to go for a quick drop-goal conversion - had it gone over there would have been a minute left with just six points in it, but sadly it didn’t and that was all she wrote.

People I know who don’t follow rugby that closely asked me over the weekend “what went wrong with Leinster” based merely on the result.  I honestly couldn’t tell them anything.  It was a highly entertaining evening in Donnybrook and I very much doubt anyone went home disappointed.

I’m pretty sure everyone involved with the Northampton Saints knows full well that Leinster will be an entirely different proposition when they face each other back-to-back in December when it counts. 

Let’s face it - the kids are back in school, the Dubs are in the All-Ireland final and Leinster rugby is cranking up for another promising season.  Not sure I have ever looked forward to a September more. JLP

LEINSTER-33 NORTHAMPTON-22

THE SECOND COMING

So it appears the Rapture was called off at the last minute. Why?

Seemingly because God heard some amazing speech being told at a rugby stadium in Cardiff that restored his faith in mankind. Or so the story goes…

Perhaps we’ll never know exactly what went on in that Leinster dressing room at halftime, but whatever it was, it certainly transformed our display by biblical proportions. If there’s one cliché any sports writer worth their salt would want to avoid it’s “a game of two halves”, but there’s no dodging it here.

If you wanted to write the perfect script for this game for Leinster fans you couldn’t have done a better job. In the first half we played much like we had all September way back at the start of the season.

But once the Schmidt-ball Express started rolling, then if the two top Aviva Premiership sides couldn’t live with it, and if the two leading sides AND the reigning champions of the Top14 couldn’t live with it, then the Saints hadn’t a hope in hell.

Although the halftime score may have surprised everyone, the first half performance of the Northampton Saints certainly shouldn’t have. All through the week they were quite happy to cower under the underdog banner as Jim Mallinder set about constructing a cup-winning gameplan, something he has shown more than once he is well capable of doing.

And as the first half wore on, it became clear that the plan was extremely simple : Dominate the scrum, do whatever you can to force mistakes, and when those mistakes happen, punish them.

Of course we were doing everything we could in the first period to spare them the bother of forcing mistakes. With just five minutes on the clock, we had already made six, with two uncharacteristic dropped high-balls from Isa, kicks from Luke and Sexton that didn’t find touch, a ball lost in the tackle from Jamie and finally, although this was a tad unlucky, a booming Sexton clearance that was just too far and pinned us back in our own 22.

That doesn’t mean the Saints weren’t doing everything they could though…sometimes legally, with superb tackling particularly from their locks Lawes and Day, and sometimes not so much, as Belfast-born number 8 Roger Wilson created the gap which led to the Saints’ opening try by clearly holding Shaggy’s leg to stop him taking his place in the defence.

But in case you think I’m using that missed Wilson transgression as an excuse, far from it. It’s a professional game, and these things are done all over the pitch by both sides and if you can get away with them, well and good. And it certainly was only a small contributor to the unbelievable halftime scoreline.

If the first quarter was dominated by our mistakes, the second was the Ben Foden Show. The man had a awesome game throughout and has not only nailed down the England World Cup 15 jersey, but surely the Lions one for 2013 is his to lose as well. Just when it mattered at both ends of the pitch he was able to make telling contributions, from a try-saving tackle on O’Driscoll to a cheeky defensive sidestep around Nacewa to, of course, the powerful finish for the Saints’ second try.

Of course you can’t mention that five-pointer without highlighting the first half scrum domination. It was the one area where the Saints always felt they could have the edge, but never mind the starting front row of Tonga’uiha, Hartley and Mujati…top praise must go to Tom Mercey for his 10-minute shift when he helped his pack win the scrum against the head which had Leinster on the back foot and led to Foden crossing.

Already the word “shell-shocked” was creeping into the heads of all pundits covering the game, but more was still to come. We were living off scraps going forward and right at the restart after Sexton had clawed three points back to make it 6-17, Hines went and dropped it again to hand the momentum right back to Northampton.

Just then they were back to full strength, and where most sides would be happy to shove it up the jumper through to the break, not so the Saints and after D’Arcy missed another tackle which saw Jon Clarke get it close to the line again, by quickly flinging it out wide, the forwards were able to get it home.

But though none of us could see it, even as the TMO confirmed the third try, a few little signs began to show that the times could be a-changing. Hartley clearly had his bell rung badly as he forced the ball down over the line and as George Hook suggested, should probably not have come out for the second half. Plus, Saints out-half Myler, who surpassed all expectations and had an excellent first half all round, had his first piece of bad luck as his conversion came back towards him off the upright.

So the Saints went marching in to their dressing room and as Jonny Sexton was evoking the memories of Liverpool in Istanbul 2005 across the hall, you can only imagine what Jim Mallinder was telling his charges.

Well, I can hold my hand on my heart and say I believed we could come back, but the way I saw it, we needed to be going into the final quarter within seven points to have a hope. Little did I know we’d be going into the final quarter with the cup all but won!

Do I need to describe our three second half tries? You’re reading this write-up, so no doubt you’ve already seen them a gagillion times already. Eventually someone will put them up on YouTube and when they do I’ll link to them here, here, and here.

There are simply not enough superlatives in the English language to describe how amazing Leinster were in that second half. Sure, the Saints had put so much effort into constructing the lead no doubt they were shattered. Sure, they may have lost the edge in their scrummaging as Hartley’s concentration was compromised. But you can’t be sure that either of those things would have stopped the Sexton-led charge which began literally from the restart as we turned the ball over at the very first contact.

As Phil Dowson went off the field for his yellow card, I certainly wasn’t going to say it to anyone in Kiely’s of Donnybrook where I was watching the match, but even though the clock was just ticking over to the 60-minute mark, I was almost sure we had it in the bag. It was only a few short minutes later when Sky commentator Miles Harrison said “and that is surely that”.

And Sexton may have been the driving force and the must-deserved man of the match, but I can’t let this article end without referring to Isa Nacewa. Shoo-in for Leinster if not Northern Hemisphere Player Of The Year, he not only got back his high-catching mojo but when the Saints were getting a late sniff of pulling back a score he wasn’t happy in chasing Foden down he got up and made sure Chris Ashton didn’t get near the line with a smother tackle from behind which left him worse off than he was after that punch from Manu.

One last thought…he may have missed a few things here and there but I have to say I thought Roman Poite silenced every single one of his pre-match critics. He called it as he saw it and in no way was a factor in the result.

And it was a result that you would think would be a perfect way to end a season but no, there’s one more matter to be resolved, that being a trip down the N7 next Saturday in an attempt to pull off what many Leinster fans are calling a “Snakebite Double” of Heineken & Magners.

If it was anywhere but Thomond Park, I’d be very confident. Instead I’m only quietly so. But there’s nothing that can happen down there that can take away from that wonderful Saturday evening. Better feeling than Edinburgh or the Grand Slam in 2009? The way the match played out I reckon so!

Well done Joe Schmidt, Jonny Sexton, Leo Cullen & the boys. Legends all. JLP