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Before Saturday night, no player had scored 25 points against Leinster in a professional game of rugby. Before Saturday night, Connacht had never won at RDS.
ack Carty stepped up and led his team to a historic victory over the Boys in Blue that opens the Guinness PRO14 season wide on both sides of the frame and brings the Westerners’ campaign to life.
Unbeaten at home in this competition since April 2019 and in a successive winning streak of bonus points dating back to the beginning of the season, Leinster was the 18-point favorite coming into the game and ended up losing 34-25.
“I think it’s huge. It’s huge not just for Connacht but for everyone else to know that they can be beaten,” said coach Andy Friend.
“We are very proud to be the team that has done it.
“But you don’t rest on this.
“The most important thing and Quinn Roux, our patron, said it there, the most important thing is that we support him now. We have Munster at the Sportsground next weekend, we have to show up and do that again.
“We hope that’s what we deliver every time.
“We know we won’t, because we are human beings, but that’s what we want to deliver and when we get that energy and that precision, you can see what happens.
“That applause is for the players and Jack Carty was an important part of that.”
At the end of the game, Roux gathered her players into a quiet group and their celebrations were surprisingly quiet.
“It’s also important to be humble when you win,” Friend said.
“We are here in the home of the potentially biggest team in Europe and we just beat them, so you don’t want to face them either.
“Being respectful is part of rugby, when the door was closed there was a lot of excitement and jumping, but I didn’t think anyone was disrespectful after the win.”
Connacht came close to ending a losing streak in Dublin dating back to 2001 several times recently and Carty was delighted to put him on the line.
Now, he wants to be backed against Munster in Galway in a key Conference B clash next week.
“There was probably a point in the second half where it could have gone either way,” he said.
“Two years ago we were in a similar position and the wheels came off the car.
“That’s probably the most enjoyable thing, there was a point where we had to pull ourselves together. Maybe we were getting a little frantic and like Friendy said, a loss is only bad if you don’t learn from it.
“In terms of the things we talked about last week, these are different conditions, but we certainly brought some aspects of that this week and that would be the most enjoyable part.
“It probably makes up for the disappointment last week (the loss to Ulster) in terms of our confidence.
“Next week is going to be huge. I don’t know what the permutations are in terms of being top v top (for the final), but it gives us the confidence to know that the game plan we have will be to set ourselves up for success.
“It’s just the fact that we’ve been here, we’ve been so close three or four times in the last five years and we never seem to get there and this time we did.”
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