Leinster’s fourth Champions Cup final appearance in five years began with a lot of promise thanks to Tommy O’Brien’s ninth-minute try, but Bordeaux’s back-to-back bid was not to be denied. Five first-half tries, two of them breakaway efforts, had Leinster trailing 35-7 by half-time.
Cullen’s men were unable to trouble that lead in the blazing Bilbao heat, as player-of-the-match Maxime Lucu kicked Bordeaux home with two penalties, meaning tries from Joe McCarthy, the best of the forwards, and Garry Ringrose mattered little in the end.
The final scoreline of 41-19 was a sobering one for Leinster who, while doing a lot of things right to reach a record ninth final, fell well short of their expectations on the day. The pace and precision of Bordeaux’s play was the deciding factor, particularly in broken play and during a three-try blitz in little over 11 minutes.
While the possession and territory statistics from the opening 40 minutes were even enough, so too the number of carries and tackles made, the French side scored five tries from just six attacking 22-metre entries – and also had a Cameron Woki score disallowed – and beat 15 defenders to Leinster’s five.
“They were just that split-second quicker than we were, and very, very clinical,” Cullen said of Bordeaux afterwwards. “But they’ve been doing that to lots of teams over the course of the last couple of seasons. So we knew it was going to be a tough challenge.
“It’s not like we’re a million miles away. I know there’s a decent gap in the scoreline today, but I think if you reflect upon what’s going on in the game, the stats in the game, that would maybe be a bit of reflection just in terms of how clinical Bordeaux were.
“The speed and the way they do things are very impressive, and that’s the bit that we need to get after. That’s probably the bit where we’re noticing, the speed of the way they’re doing things. That is a mindset that we need to adopt in our league as well.
“Obviously there’s different variables and challenges and all the rest, but that’s probably the one thing that I would take away from the Top 14 right now. Speed, quality, you can see it in squads that every team has built.”
The quality and strength of the French league is reflected in the fact that they achieved a double in Bilbao, with Montpellier also winning the EPCR Challenge Cup at the expense of Ulster. The last six Champions Cup finals have been won by French teams – twice each by La Rochelle, Toulouse, and Bordeaux.
There have been numerous cycles of success in the European Cup over the years, including Irish Rugby’s period of dominance between 2006 and 2012 when Munster won twice and Leinster were champions three times. Toulon and Saracens took centre stage after that, but now Bordeaux are the club to beat.
As good as Yannick Bru’s charges were, Leinster’s inability to be able to stop or at least stymie the defending champions once they got on a roll was concerning as the first half progressed, at the end of which they had missed 15 tackles.
They ended the game with more possession (57%) and territory (55%) than their opponents, and more carries and metres made and the same amount of line breaks, but the sharpness of Bordeaux’s attack was summed by their average of 4.4 points per attacking 22-metre entry, compared to Leinster’s 1.6.
Cullen conceded: “We’ve given away things just a little bit cheaply, and I think there is frustration there that we’ve created lots of opportunities in the game and haven’t been anywhere near as clinical as we would have liked to have been.
“There’s lots of great stuff in terms of trying to get back into the game, and we scored a couple of good tries in the second half, and we still left so many opportunities out there.
“It’s a pressure cooker out there. It’s very frustrating because you want to give a better account of yourselves, don’t you, because you want to be with that ruthless mindset in terms of execution, where we’re just not quite there.
“You’ve got to say a massive well done to Bordeaux because they have been insanely clinical in everything that they did in scoring five tries in the first half.
“We scored three tries in the game, we’ve lots of possession during the game, lots of territory during the game, but we’re just nowhere near as clinical with what we had. They made us really pay, so that’s the bit that we reflect on probably the most.”
While McCarthy manfully tried to lead Leinster’s fightback, too many of their usual leading lights failed to impose themselves on the final. Bordeaux’s heavyweight pack had a lot to do with that, and they won the key individual battles across the pitch, with Lucu, Woki, the two-try Louis Bielle-Biarrey, and Yoram Moefana standing out.
With a short turnaround to next week’s BKT United Rugby Championship play-offs, Cullen’s side can at least take positives from a second half which they won 12-6. Coming off the bench, Ciarán Frawley provided some creative spark at out-half, and Max Deegan made over 40 metres from three carries.
Since Leinster last lifted the Champions Cup trophy eight years ago, they have won five league crowns, including their famous 2018 double. Defending the URC title now becomes all the more important following their demoralising loss to Bordeaux.
Ahead of the quarter-final visit of the Lions to the Aviva Stadium, the Newtownmountkennedy man commented: “It’s a quarter-final, and hopefully we get a turnout there. I know we ask a lot of fans, we know that.
“It’s into the final bend of the season, isn’t it? We just need to make sure everyone’s pushing as hard as they possibly can in these next few weeks because otherwise it just becomes very anticlimactic for these guys.
“We want to have a proper send-off for them at the end of the season. We’ll be doing everything we possibly can to make that happen.
“Unfortunately when you sit here on the losing side, you’ve clearly just not been good enough on the day, and that’s something we need to reflect upon and get better at in the future.
“Can we get better at it and go on and try to win the URC? Let’s hope so. Can we get better to get to another final and win another final in this competition next season?
“That’s quite a long way down the track, isn’t it? But that is where everyone’s at all the time. Nothing stays the same forever in sport, does it?.”