Cullen hopes old days are gone

Barry Coughlan

Leinster skipper Leo Cullen doesn’t do seat warming very well. Even carrying water for the team doesn’t turn him on much, especially when his colleagues are at the wrong end of a hiding.

So last weekend in Galway, Cullen wasn’t in particularly good mood and it mattered little that he could not be accused of any responsibility for how badly his side crumbled to a resurgent Connacht at the Sportsground.

Cullen will still be sidelined with an arm injury again this weekend when his Heineken Cup champions seek to lift themselves against arch-rivals Munster in the last RaboDirect game before the start of another European campaign. However, rather than bemoan what happened in Galway, Cullen sees this as an opportunity to atone and figures no motivation will be needed for the team to lift themselves for an Irish rugby derby that traditionally has more bite than any other.

The second rower won’t look any further than Saturday but he does know that an upsurge in form is required quickly before Leinster set out on the European trail against Exeter the following week.

“Ultimately, I suppose you can put up with the odd loss in the league but in Europe it certainly is different. You can be put out of the competition very quickly so a defeat like we had in Connacht certainly serves to focus the mind.

“I would hope that the Sportsground was a good wake up call for us, I mean we didn’t play well against Llanelli in the first game, and won three games in a row even though there were areas of our performance that showed we weren’t up to quite the right level.

“It’s not what we want [being beaten]. We like to perform at a certain level and we don’t want to be up one game and down the next. That might have been Leinster of old but we hope those days are gone, we want to be a team that’s hard to beat every single weekend.”

The Leinster coach Joe Schmidt will certainly insist this be the case at the Aviva. He wasn’t at all happy with the outcome in Galway although he did heap praise on Connacht for the achievement and wondered whether even a full strength Leinster side could have done enough to turn the tide on a night when the men in green were irrepressible.

His main worry is that off the back of that defeat he can’t call on many of his front-liners as the injury list grows.
 
“That’s a new thing to the environment which is a concern for us. In the past we’ve mostly had guys coming back into the team [at this stage of the season]. Now there is a real onus on the guys who have formed the skeleton of the team over the last few years. It’s a key time for them to step up, to provide the glue and the intensity to allow the guys gel around them to get the performance.”

Source: http://feeds.examiner.ie/~r/iesportsblog/~3/nXfAkyIXRj4/post.aspx

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