Heineken Cup: Are Leinster the best rugby side in Europe?

WHO gave them the key to the cookie cupboard? An all-Irish Heineken Cup final will not only fill Twickenham’s spacious stadium on Saturday afternoon but it will also mean that an Irish team will have won Europe’s biggest club prize in five of the last seven years. The Monopolies Commission is on the case.

Next weekend’s match will determine the 2012 Heineken Cup winners but it won’t decide which club is the best in Europe. . . that much is obvious, whoever walks away with the silverware

Leinster are looking to lift their third Heineken Cup in four years, they are ranked the number one side by European Club Rugby and the website eurorugby.com agrees. To show just how far ahead of the chasing pack they are, Leinster top the eurorugby.com table on 100 points (the leaders are always awarded 100) while second-placed Leicester Tigers are so far back on 83 that they might as well be in a different division. Third-placed Clermont sit on 82 and Ulster are 11th on 66 points. In addition to their European heroics, Leinster finished the regular league season ten points ahead of the pack.

Leinster are on an extraordinary roll. Unless Glasgow conjured up something very special yesterday evening, they have lost just three matches all season and two of them came in the opening three weeks. They are unbeaten in a record-breaking 14 straight Heineken matches and, should they triumph on Saturday, they will become the first team to win every Heineken match in a season since Brive managed it way back in 1997 (playing two fewer games along the way).

Presented with such excellence, it’s tempting to look for some sort of special ingredient that the Dubliners sup or smoke when Mars is in the ascendant, a magic potion of the sort that gets Asterix out of many a fix because, as fixes go, they don’t come much bigger than trailing to Northampton Saints by 6-22 at half time in last year’s Heineken final while their set scrum was being systematically dismantled. How else can anyone rationally explain the turnaround that saw Leinster score 27 second-half points to claim the cup?

But resisting the urge to credit either hocus or pocus, it becomes evident that Leinster are the best team in Europe for all the traditional reasons – good people, good systems and honest hard work.

They first hired Aussie coach Michael Cheika, who gave the Dubliners a hard edge, and he was followed by Kiwi Joe Schmidt, who has taken the club to an entirely new level. Schmidt is well served by a pool of players that boasts both depth and excellence. After beating Clermont in the Heineken semi-final, Schmidt sent out 15 new faces one week later at Newport in the league and still beat the Dragons.

The French Foreign Legion are notoriously indifferent to who they sign up but Leinster’s foreign legion have been hand-picked with loving care. It’s difficult to find a dud, from Felipe Contepomi through Rocky Elsom, Nathan Hines, Isa Nacewa and finally to Brad Thorn, who made 13 tackles against Clermont. Those would be good stats for a teenage flanker, never mind a 37-year-old lock with more miles on the clock than Michael Schumacher’s Mercedes.

The only thing this side needed was time and God made plenty of it. The core of the team – Brian O’Driscoll and Gordon D’Arcy, Eoin Reddan, Leo Cullen, Cian Healy, Jamie Heaslip and Rob Kearney – have been together for a long time now, lost together, learnt the lessons and lost together again before they finally triumphed in 2009, coming from behind to beat Leicester Tigers at Murrayfield.

It was no overnight success – Leinster have made the play-offs in eight of the last ten years – but rather a challenge that has grown in strength until it has become all but irresistible. If one man tipped the balance it was Johnny Sexton, the final piece of the jigsaw, a world-class talent and a talisman for the Dubliners just as his rival Ronan O’Gara was and remains for those in Munster red.

Come to think of it, there just may be one magic ingredient to Leinster’s astonishing success and, if so, it surely lies well south of the city. Dublin fans may scoff at the “turnips” of Munster but it was the men in red who set the standard in Europe. It was Munster’s phenomenal record in this competition, winning it outright in 2006 and 2008 after several close shaves, that persuaded the city slickers to roll up their sleeves and get dirty.

We are speaking metaphorically but there is no doubt that years of playing second fiddle to Munster ensured that Leinster hardened up, mentally and physically, in order to grab a slice of glory for themselves. Needless to say the record Leinster beat with their 14-match unbeaten streak belonged to Munster. It wasn’t until they walloped their rivals 25-6 in the 2009 semi-final that Leinster finally got the Munster monkey off their backs and went on to win the tournament.

It may come as cold comfort to the Munstermen watching the final but, without their trail-blazing in Europe, there was next to no chance of Leinster even dreaming of their current success.

Not that all of the above means Ulster can’t win. Brian McLaughlin is an astute coach and his players will want to make the point that they perhaps don’t universally agree with the decision of the boss David Humphreys to stand him down at the season’s close. The Ulster chief executive would be left red faced if Mc Laughlin’s last act as head coach was to hand him the Heineken Cup with a suggestion as to where he puts it.

But, if they are to win on Saturday, Ulster will need to play the best game of their lives because they are up against the best team in Europe.