ROMAIN POITE wasn’t in the talking mood yesterday. That left Leinster captain Leo Cullen a frustrated secondrow as the scrum yet again became the talking point of a match that seemed to fall through Leinster’s fingers and fritter away.
When Nathan White was sin-binned less than 10 minutes from the end without any real warning or sequence of infringements, Leinster simply didn’t have enough in the tank for the succession of Osprey attacks or little Shane Williams. What a way for the Ospreys winger to bow out of the game.
Cullen left the RDS in varying degrees of exasperation and confusion as the French referee declined to communicate to the Leinster forward what was going on in his head. Where exactly White’s yellow card came from in a scrum on 72 minutes may never really be known.
“He didn’t want to talk to me today, which was really frustrating,” said Cullen. “You pick up the award for getting the least number of yellow cards in the season and then pick up two in the final. There were a lot of things today that left me scratching my head. They gave us that eight- or nine- or 10-point lead and it was frustrating that we let them back into the game.
“It’s one of those games where when I look back I’ll be scratching my head as to why we lost. In the past I’ve never had an issue with Romain. It was just today he didn’t really want to talk. That’s his prerogative.
“Losing three (league) finals is not ideal. Today 10 minutes to go and eight or nine points ahead . . . that’s not ideal. But that’s life. That’s sport,” he added.
To stand back and look at what Leinster have achieved over the last two years might be breathtaking but Cullen and Joe Schmidt were stuck in the moment, the immediacy of the disappointment clouding any real sense of an otherwise successful season. There was no indulging in past glories.
“We’re too competitive to console ourselves with anything but the last result,” said Schmidt. “I thought it was a super kick by Dan Biggar from the edge to do pretty much what he did to us last time to get a one-point win.”
Down a man at the end of each half turned out to be pivotal to the outcome. In those two important phases Leinster gave away one third of their points.
“They scored a try in each of those instances,” said Schmidt, not needing to elaborate. “At the start of the second half when we were still down a man they scored a try and they scored a try when we were down a man at the end so it obviously has an impact, particularly in that last 10 minutes we felt that we would have a bit of fatigue.”
Schmidt was in that post-match mood where he appeared to be biting his tongue. While he did, as always, keep his composure, the sense that the refereeing was as inexplicable to him as it was to his captain was inescapable.
“There were a few contentious things but there always are in finals,” said Schmidt. “There was a chat with the officials at half-time. Those things happen . . . Inevitably there is frustration when you lose a game. We got two props sin-binned.
“As I said we’ll have another look at those. There were a couple of decisions leading up to the last try but inevitably you get that. We’ll have a good look at it because we’re driven to improve game to game but a lot of those things won’t happen until we get back together in a month’s time.”
For Cullen the summer opens out. “Some of us will go on holidays, some are on tour. We’ll hear what our group in Europe is in a couple of weeks,” said the captain. It’s business as usual for us. We’ll start the planning in our heads and then it’s back to the slog of the league.”
