‘We need to see what we’re all made of now’ – Leo Cullen urges his Leinster players to regroup for URC tilt

Battered, bloodied, beaten. The trio’s devastated body language summed up the mood inside the Leinster dressing room that for the third consecutive season was left to come to terms with a heart-breaking Champions Cup final defeat.

Seated between Ryan and Doris, Cullen stressed how important the Ireland duo would be in terms of overcoming this latest setback, the scar tissue from which threatens to linger.

As the province’s co-captain, Ryan was one of the main voices, and as he gave a flavour of what he said to his shattered teammates, his defiant outlook had both Doris and Cullen nodding in agreement.

“What we said in the changing room was, when you want to do great things and you want to achieve great things, you always have the risk of failing greatly as well,” Ryan said.

“Would I rather be in a team that tries to be the best team in Europe every year and have risks in a team like this? I still would.

“That’s part of trying to do special things, but as I said, you run the risk of feeling like this, but that’s the way we are. We want to win trophies and there’s a lot more hurt now, but as Leo said, we just have to bounce back. That’s the way it is. Bounce back in another competition to go after, and hopefully do as well as we can in that.”

Leinster post match press conference

Cullen called on his players to show what they are made of for the remainder of the season, but the Leinster boss admitted that it would be tough to go again for the URC run-in.

Leinster must somehow quickly turn the page ahead of a home game against Connacht next Friday, but the crushing nature of this 31-22 defeat leaves Cullen’s men facing another potential trophy-less season.

In that regard, the URC is now imperative for Leinster, and while their self-confessed ‘obsession’ with the Champions Cup is over for another year, the reality is, there is still a trophy up for grabs over the coming weeks.

"That's the thing around the character part,” Cullen said.

“We need to see what we're all made of now as hard as that will be.

“We've got to be able to process that and move onto the next challenge because we've got a game on Friday night at the RDS against Connacht, so they won't make life any easier for us, I don't think.

“It's a very short turnaround and there was 100 minutes of rugby out their for a lot of guys. We'll make some calls and get on with it. We have a home quarter-final the week after that and that's what we need to get our head around in the short term.

"It's another opportunity to win a trophy, so a great chance. You can see how competitive the URC is now so that's it. We've got to turn the page at some point in the next few days.

“We'll get a group that will get ready to play against Connacht and we'll see who we have available. Then we'll turn our attention to the following week against whoever that's going to be.

“There are so many permutations there, but you have potentially another month of the season left to go. We want to go after it full steam, definitely."

Asked if he had received any clarity about why James Lowe’s try was disallowed just before half-time, Cullen responded:

"I was on the sideline at that point and it was quite hard to see if there was a knock-on.

“Again, there's a few things in the game I'm not sure about, I haven't seen the footage back. That's what I mean, there's so many calls within the game and we're not even seeing them. It's not like I'm looking at the tape in the last couple of minutes.

“Some of their scramble I thought was good.

“As I said, they pushed the boundaries and listen, they got away with it, so it’s credit to them.

“It just felt we were so close to breaking them and I think most people in the stadium are probably having that sense, so you have to give them a huge amount of credit for the fact that they held firm.

“It was one of those games, if we had scored a try at any point in the first 60 minutes, I would have had confidence that we could push on and force their hand a little bit, but they came up with some big moments.

“Some individuals came up with big moments for them and that’s the difference. It’s such fine margins when you’ve got two quality squads of players going at it.

“Everyone’s devastated in there now, they poured a hell of a lot into it,” Cullen added.

“I think it’s two very good squads of players going at it in an amazing stadium and it comes down to the finest margins.

“There’s a drop goal at the end and if it goes a metre to the right we’re having a very different conversation in here.

“That’s the nature of sport at the top and obviously we’ve been on the losing side, unfortunately, on a few occasions now.

“You get this narrative that builds off the back of that, people start adding all the different bits together but when you break down this specific game it came down to very tight calls at different stages and not enough of them went our way unfortunately, over the course of particularly the first 80 minutes anyway.”