Hell is a May Bank Holiday semi-final in France. Even if you win. It is Test match rugby in a furnace. Hell.
Victory means you get to go to work Monday morning. Lose, and everything stops.
(Yes, I am being dramatic, and yes, this rugby season feels like it will never end.)
How La Rochelle go this weekend against Leinster will reshape the narrative around Ronan O’Gara the coach.
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What a story his career has been since nimbly switching from veteran Munster man to Racing kicking coach. And on down to Canterbury before coming back around to face the ol’ blue enemy, with all the chips on the table.
Personally, I think the constant chatter about Ronan inevitably coming home to Munster is just juicy gossip. I don’t think he’ll ever take that gig. Not under the current job spec.
After all the sensible moves he has made to bring his career to this juncture, it looks like a cul-de-sac. The organisation has structural flaws that have led to present and previous coaches being set up to ultimately fall short of stated intentions.
Thing is, if O’Gara fails at Munster where does he go next?
The romance around him coaching his home province is completely built upon the expectation of success. Should results go askew, all that nostalgia fades as your career choices narrow. Munster’s Achilles heel, for many years now, was an inability to produce local talent that will eventually play for Ireland in the Six Nations.
Unless O’Gara is bringing Klopp levels of co-ordination to Munster, with the necessary tools supplied behind the scenes to be successful long term, why would he jeopardise everything he has built?
Moving from La Rochelle to the Ireland coaching ticket might work after the next World Cup. But, again, I would say rushing into an international job can be equally foolhardy. If the timing is wrong, the squad of players is wrong, and you are set up to fail.
Being a good coach is as much about picking the right job, as well as waiting for the right job. Matt Williams rushed to the Scottish job, for understandable reasons, while Joe Schmidt took the Irish reins on his own terms.
Resurrection from a failed international innings – and don’t worry, it almost always ends in failure – takes time. Some coaches never come back. Declan Kidney and Stuart Lancaster offer recent blueprints of successfully turning that page.
Irish rugby has proved a graveyard for Irish coaches. The system refuses to transition our ex-players into coaches, not when they can take what the agents are offering from abroad.
I think we may need to face up to the reality that Rog might never come back. I think he is too smart and too good a coach to take an unnecessary risk.
Maybe the bottom line will turn his head. Or a partnership with Paulie O’Connell, that everyone can’t help banging on about, will prove irresistible. Eventually.
Either way, there is a third autobiography in Ronan O’Gara and chapter one starts now.
What are Leinster getting themselves into on Sunday evening? The coastal town of La Rochelle is the dark alley for visiting rugby teams.
O’Gara has the opportunity to put himself in the same tactical sphere as Lancaster.
The coach never wins a semi-final but he can lose it by the way he commands the field of play.
As much as O’Gara likes to dampen down his rise through the coaching ranks in France, his team sits second in the Top 14. And they just made him their director of rugby. All in the same week they face four-time winners in a Champions Cup semi-final.
O’Gara knows Leinster as much, if not better than Michael Cheika’s former right-hand man. Jono Gibbes moves to Clermont this summer, but not before he attempts to wreck Leo Cullen’s finely tuned machine.
It was Cullen who replaced Gibbes as Leinster forwards coach when the All Black made his first move to Clermont in 2014.
If any team can derail Leinster it has to be La Rochelle and the scheming O’Gara and Gibbes.
They have the power game to ruin Leinster’s battle for the fifth star final against Toulouse. O’Gara’s team also likes nothing more than to express their athletic gifts, with the almost unplayable Fijian centre Levani Botia punching them over the gainline and offloading in contact.
In theory, Rog's club should come up short, but imagine how much he has been licking his lips at the prospect of revisiting that seismic 2006 semi-final at Lansdowne road
In Gregory Alldritt they possess the premier number eight in the northern hemisphere. They’ve All Blacks right where you want them at scrumhalf, Tawera Ker-Barlow, and backrow, Victor Vito. Their scrum – with tighthead Uini Atonio and Wallaby lock Will Skelton bringing the surge – can shunt Leinster’s eight into the dirt.
They are built to play semi-final rugby in every area except where it matters the most – outhalf. Injuries, and perhaps an inability to lure Jack Crowley from Munster, means they lack what O’Gara used to bring to this type of fixture.
Rog has held his nerve, while making Dimitri Yachvili and Jean Baptise Elissalde blink, in the 2006 and 2008 finals.
That is why Leinster should prevail, regardless of how La Rochelle decides to attack them.
But it promises to be a tight affair. Maybe not for 80 minutes but until this giant French outfit, littered with class like Bruce Dulin at fullback, is figured out, on and off the pitch.
In theory, Rog’s club should come up short, but can you imagine how much he has been licking his lips at the prospect of revisiting that seismic 2006 semi-final at Lansdowne road?
Odds on Ronan jumping into a crowd of Stade Rochelais ultras if history repeats itself?
Covid will prevent such a celebration but do you remember him embracing the south terrace?
I bloody do.
Leinster have produced enough clutch moments in recent memory to pass this examination. Flipping a 0-14 scoreboard against Exeter should have won them the trophy but two French clubs stand in the way.
The title never comes easy. Semi-finals are hell. Semi-finals under a blazing French sun create a unique physical torture – just to get back on your feet after a tackle. You are gasping for air. You are hurt, and probably should go off. Your legs feel like jelly.
But if you lag for a split second, Botia will notice and Botia will run over the top of you. Say you drag him down by the boot laces, watch as his one-handed offload puts Dillyn Leyds disappearing into the light.
O'Gara is on the main stage again – back where he belongs
Leinster knows how to win and how to lose semi-finals. With or, sadly this time, without Johnny Sexton. I doubt anyone is questioning Ross Byrne’s array of weapons after his quarter-final cameo at Sandy Park.
Some teams need to lose a few semis before they win their first final. That was Leinster in 2009. La Rochelle can take a giant leap on Sunday or they can continue on the upward trajectory O’Gara is sending them, at least until 2024.
How do they beat Leinster? To play the way that got them here will not be enough. Sure, they will score tries but Leinster can match them and edge the kicking duel.
I think they will adopt a more traditional French approach to knock-out rugby. I think they will try to suffocate Leinster and progress by making zero mistakes.
I think this will fail but it is their best shot.
Whichever way Gibbes and O’Gara set them up, it will be a fascinating opening 15, 20 minutes. The game could be settled in these exchanges.
We are bluffing here. We do not know how this is going to go. The safe prediction is that Leinster shake off the Munster drubbing at the RDS and find their rhythm early and keep the scoreboard clicking.
The match-ups demand a tactical masterclass from the coaching box.
Watch the other semi-final between Toulouse and Bordeaux to see how French clubs like to suck the life out of these occasions.
I am expecting a Saturday for the purist and a Sunday where Leinster should be savvy enough to send Rog back to school. It is very dangerous to write such words about my co-pilot in the Ireland midfield for a decade. O’Gara is on the main stage again – back where he belongs – pitting his rugby wits against the more advanced coaching brain of Lancaster.
And, do not forget, he is also trying to out-fox an old nemesis in Felipe Contepomi. Subplots galore.
