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How to beat Leinster in 2020: Step one, “harass” your inexperienced backfield into making mistakes. Step two, build an advantage earlier, step three, defending your lives with a total of 177 tackles.
And, to be safe, break your scrum into small pieces.
This season he will only have one plan to show how this can be done. These were Saracens, as brutally effective as we have ever seen them.
Mark McCall, the European champions rugby director, summed it up better than anyone after ending Leinster’s record-chasing campaign with a thud.
“This group of players never ceases to amaze us,” said the former Irish center after a 25-17 victory that closed an Anglo-Irish trilogy in favor of Sarries (2-1). “It is a team that has been through a lot together in the last four or five seasons. I think you saw the solidarity they have out there ”.
The Saracens’ appetite was shown from the start, by the way they patiently built a 15-3 wall for Leinster to climb, through the boots of Alex Goode and Elliot Daly, before a cruel scrum performance that de somehow manages to improve Mako Vunipola’s reputation. .
Not that Vunipola needs much improvement, but back spasms were supposed to get him out of these quarterfinals.
“I thought our scrum was amazing given that Mako hasn’t played a game for a long time,” McCall said. “Coming in and scrumming the way he did was amazing. They were lucky not to get a yellow card. It was certainly an important factor in the match.
“It was an incredible performance from our entire pack.”
Simply put, Leinster couldn’t handle the initial intensity.
Brad Barritt with man of the match Mike Rhodes. Photograph: Dan Sheridan / Inpho
“We put them under the kind of pressure that we hoped to put them under,” McCall explained. “But you have to go out and do it. The players were so committed, so attentive to everything.
“Then the onslaught started in the second half and we were probably passive, just holding on to our lead, but there were some defensive teams in the second half that were out of this world.
“It showed everything that we expect us to do.”
McCall was asked to explain how they discovered Leo Cullen’s equipment.
“There are not too many obvious weaknesses in this Leinster team. We are talking about trying to put them in a position that they are not normally used to. Trying to harass them in the back field as much as we can, force them to do things that they normally wouldn’t want to do 20 or 30 meters away from their goal line. “
Each of the starting Saracen forwards reached double figures on the tackle count. Jamie George, the England and Lions prostitute, made 20 for himself.
This is not the Saracen team that chose and destroyed Leinster in the final of the Champions Cup last year. George Kruis is gone, Owen Farrell is suspended and South Africans like Brad Barritt and Michael Rhodes were one year old in their 30s.
Both were outstanding, Rhodes was named man of the match.
The excuse that Leinster wasn’t battle hardened enough or proven enough by interprovincial derbies to handle the Saracens doesn’t wash out either.
“It has been difficult for the group in the last five weeks to make the Premiership games make sense,” McCall said. “We were concerned if we could flip a switch and just flip it against a team as good as them. But we can and we did. “
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