SIDELINE CUT:Once derided as the glamorous front of the old school tie network, Leinster are now poised to become the new national darlings on an island hungry for heroic heroes

WHAT HAS happened to Leinster rugby? For years, understanding Leinster was a relatively easy business. In the good old days of amateurism and the early years of professionalism, the Leinster rugby team was regarded as the glamorous front of the old school tie network: the gilded and best representatives of the marbled corridors of Ireland’s private schools and oak-panelled board rooms – those places in which most of us have never set foot.

They won some games and lost some games but the important thing was they looked immaculate, scored some dishy tries and were gentlemen in victory and defeat. Then, they could afford to be because, although they enjoyed their rugby, it was ultimately just another manifestation of varied and privileged lives and all players knew that once the final whistle came after a series of glorious rugby days and a warm ripple of applause rippled through the dusky evening in Donnybrook, they could look forward to an afterlife in international business and prestige Pro-Am golf tournaments.

Leinster rugby was about the perpetuation of a tradition and rugby became less serious as it went on. If the Leinster Schools’ Cup was a deathly serious, religious business not just for the 16- and 17-year-old boys whose existences revolved around it but for the adults who followed it, then the nights of the interpros in Donnybrook were little more than a brilliant place to meet up and get slowly soused under the floodlights, reminisce about the good old days and talk about the prospects for the school in the year ahead.

It was fun but somehow frivolous, as if Leinster rugby was about the right to fight for nothing more important than the right to wear Abercrombie and Fitch. And that was just fine.

Munster, meanwhile, were serious and crafty when it came to creating a mythology. There is a theory that if you placed everything ever written about World War One beside anything ever written about Munster versus the All-Blacks match in Thomond Park 1978, it would be a close call as to which pile of literature would make the bigger bonfire.

For a long time, Munster rugby was arguably bigger than Irish rugby and it certainly had its own distinct identity.

Munster specialised in days so drenched and misty that you couldn’t see the ball, in big charismatic front men who liked to sing a ballad and down a pint of stout – often at half -time – and who couldn’t see a Frenchman without wishing to box him.

There must have been backs playing for Munster but it was the front men who got all the kudos – those garrulous types with sonorous voices and rogue’s smiles, boulevardiers who charmed and scrapped their way through rugby seasons. And Munster, of course, had the ultimate endorsement in the devotion of Richard Harris, the toughest, booziest and most charismatic actor of his day.

Harris’s love of Munster gave the country team its stamp of authenticity. And while Munster had A Man Called Horse as its most celebrated cheerleader, Leinster had Ross O’Carroll Kelly.

When the professional era arrived and Munster began to move at a smarter pace, the story was all about roots. Through a combination of magical luck and clever thinking, the bit of devilishness and camaraderie was carried from Munster’s amateur decades through to its current incarnation as a powerful brand in international rugby union. Visiting players don’t ‘buy’ into it because it is not a commodity or anything fake but is also surely going to become more difficult to maintain the Munster spirit as memories and stories and characters from the wild days of amateur rugby recede. But Munster made humility their thing.

Players placed great emphasis on never getting above their station, of being of the people. And the people loved them for it. The Munster fans fell for the mythology so completely that some of them probably think the Heineken Cup has been going for a hundred years.

And then the team gave these valorous, against-all-odds performances which gave substance to the whole movement and on those winter days (before RTÉ lost the coverage to Sky) when Hookie and Tom McGurk were in floods of tears and lashing their breasts on the gantry and Michael Corcoran was in orgasmic raptures on RTÉ radio, it was very easy to believe that whatever was left of the soul of old Ireland was wrapped up in the feats of these men in red. Suddenly, Munster rugby fronted the biggest popular movement since Daniel O’Connell was out rallying the masses.

And what team wouldn’t falter in the face of the popular movement which Munster became? The easy judgement to make was that Munster were everything that Leinster were not. The easy dismissal was that Leinster was a ‘club’ while Munster was a team.

None of it was fair, of course. But that didn’t matter. For a few years it was hard not to conclude that there was something of the lost boys about Leinster rugby; that they lacked a real home and a real voice.

Well, they have found it. It has taken a few years longer for Leinster to earn the acknowledgement that they are just as fierce about their province as their foes and friends from Munster; that they had the same ambition and bloody-minded determination; that the constituency they represent is just as valid as that of Munster. The world didn’t flip when they beat their old rivals with that stinging display in the Heineken Cup semi -final in 2009 but it was certainly clear by then that Leinster weren’t going to be pushed around any more. Slowly the penny dropped that they were just as much ‘of the people’ as Munster were.

And even as they began to appeal to those places beyond the traditional strongholds of Leinster rugby, they also began to earn the admiration and support of casual rugby fans across the country where rugby is largely still a television sport. People began tuning in for Leinster games. Following Munster on sunny afternoons with ice tinkling in cider glasses became a vogue-ish pastime across the land. The odd thing is that there may be more riding on this Leinster win.

And there is something appropriate about the fact that after all the showdowns between Connacht rugby and the IRFU, it is the Leinster boys who will secure Connacht’s place in the Heineken Cup next year should they win themselves against Northampton late this afternoon. For years, Leinster teams have appeared at the Sportsground as the living embodiment of the Haves of Irish rugby. They arrived on freezing nights, brought all the shimmering names off the bench in the second half, won and fled for the bright lights.

Today, they are poised to do rugby in Connacht the ultimate favour.

And so you can bet the pubs in Mayo and Galway are going to be busy this evening and people will be cheering not just for selfish reasons but because there is now a general recognition that, like Munster before them, Leinster are one of those Irish teams that do not come about very often.

So it has come full circle. If this Leinster team are not careful, they are going to become the new national darlings on an island that is crying out for an heroic team like never before. And then where will we be?