Mike Ford, the former Irish and English defensive coach who is now proving quite a dab hand at the attacking stuff in his guise as head coach at upwardly mobile Bath, does not believe Leinster are necessarily out of contention in this pool of sharks, and can cite his own team's experience last season.
Then Bath lost their opening game 37-10 away to Glasgow before being beaten 21-19 at home to Toulouse a week later.
“We we only had a point and topped the group. We didn’t even think about qualifying and we went to Montpellier. That was the next game and all of a sudden you are back in the frame.”
Bath actually topped their group with back-to-back bonus-point wins over Montpellier, a wonderful bonus point win away to Toulouse and a victory in their final group game at home to Glasgow. The difference, of course, is that Leinster must now face the three-in-a-row champions Toulon rather than a dilatory Montpellier, not to mention avenging their two defeats to Bath and Wasps.
More fluent
As last season’s form indicates, Bath are liable to be even more fluent come January and beyond. Ford said he didn’t expect his team to be as strong as they were in the second half of last season, when a run of seven straight wins after their European Cup quarter-final defeat to Leinster propelled them to the Premiership final.
“With the disruption of the World Cup we haven’t played many games and we had last week off. We are going to be okay.
"Further down the line you have to be hanging in there in the Premiership, which we are at the moment. We have our first win of the Champions Cup and if we are hanging in there at the end of the season in both competitions we will be doing alright."
Even so, they were altogether more fluent than Leinster here, and as indicated by his banging on the window of the coaches’ box near the end indicated, he’d have been livid if they hadn’t closed out this win.
“That were double-glazed,” he quipped in his broad northern English accent. “I just thought we showed our inexperience at 16-9. I know Leinster were desperate [for the win] but we were in control of the game and we just did things stupidly that let them back in. We then get to 19-16 and we do it again, and luckily Stuart [Hooper] nicked that last lineout.
“Look, I’m pleased we won against a desperate Leinster side full of internationals. I thought we played some good rugby. Our scrum was awesome. That won us the game. I thought our attack and shape was good, but we can’t afford to give teams easy outs.
“It’s a young side. You don’t want to curb the ambition too much, do you? The ability to play wide in our own half. But it’s a learning curve and we’ve got to learn quickly. If we’d played Toulon today we probably would have lost.”
Isaac Boss for one was adamant that this defeat did not spell the end of Leinster's European hopes.
“We’ve got to win all the rest of our matches to put ourselves in that position. We might need a bit of luck but we’ve got to be positive. We’ve got to put ourselves in the position that if a couple of teams get out of our pool then we’re that second team.”
Aspirations Indeed, with his former province Ulster also soundly beaten at home by English opposition in their delayed opening game
on Friday night, it feels like the end of an era as much as the two sides’ Euro aspirations this season.
“Not at all,” said Boss. “Everyone is quick to jump on the bandwagon whether it is doom or gloom or the positive thing but that is the way it goes. It is those small margins. There is a long way to go yet.”
