To again roll their sleeves up and come from behind reflects well on the undoubted spirit within the Leinster squad, and will also have given them genuine satisfaction.
Jamie Heaslip put in another tour de force and again picked up the slack in the absence of primary ball carriers Sean O'Brien and Cian Healy. His total of 19 carries didn't quite top last week's 23, but it was nonetheless impressive. Still, the captain was inclined to temper his delight afterwards.
“I thought we got momentum at times and broke them down, but mistakes kind of killed us and we turned over the ball quite easily.
Lot of grit
“The first 15 minutes we compounded a few errors to get them back into the game, gave them a few penalties. But (there was) a lot of grit there. It’s a very happy changing room. It’s a tired changing room, but it just shows that when we need to go to that place of really pushing it and grinding it out, we can do it.”
As for his own tally of carries, Heaslip said modestly: “I wouldn’t say a lot of those carries were more than a metre or two even – and some are probably minus metres. I can’t really gloat that much about it. It’s great to always get your hands on the ball, but I’ll do whatever is good for the team.”
Echoing Heaslip's lament about silly mistakes, penalties and another slow start, Devin Toner added: "It happened to us again. We had talked before about not starting the game well. We let them into it.
“That was one of the things we were looking for but it didn’t work for us. And then, in the second half, we let them back into it. Just indiscipline. I missed a restart and they got on top of us with stupid penalties. But really, really happy with the way the lads dug in. We had confidence in ourselves to get back into it.”
“We have got to start games better. We haven’t up until now. We’ll have a lot of lads coming back from injury as well. Just building on these two games, the confidence we will get from it is massive.”
“We concentrated on the breakdown,” Toner revealed.
“We knew that (Ibrahim) Diarra was coming off the bench and he is really good over the ball. The one thing we were concentrated on was getting two barrels in and blasting past and just holding onto the ball. We held onto the ball pretty well and went through the phases.
“For October it was pretty hot but the lads did really well, staying hydrated all yesterday [Saturday] and today. The week before, I was cramping coming near the end of a game but I wasn’t there.
“It shows what type of game it was when a front five got a man of the match,” added Toner with a laugh in reference to his award.
Building up
However, he also offered the opinion that his form was “not as good as I had hoped. I think I was falling off a few tackles. But I’m building up into it and looking to get back to where I was last year.”
Isaac Boss had to do a fair amount of excavating at times, and admitted: "It was pretty tough around the breakdown. We can tidy up that area a little bit but they came pretty hard at times. The ruck is always a challenging area, but we got a crucial penalty towards the end."
