Leinster v Cardiff Blues

[redunderthebed]

Great game worth the sleep depravation to stay up to watch it. The kicking of leigh halfpenny and felipe contepomi was great and leinster was rather patchy great in bits rather crap in others in a way cardiff was robbed but that sometimes that happens.

 

[An Tarbh]

bit ****** off with not being able to watch this but the feed on the S4C site kept rebuffering every 2 seconds and not having the patience of a saint I just couldn't watch it.

So were Leinster in any way creative, was it a case of the Blues not closing out the game or what?

 

[Sir Speedy]

Which is strange, since they've been reknowned as the Welsh whipping boys over the past few seasons, though that ***le has almost passed onto the Scarlets.
Still, it doesn't matter whether the other teams do the same thing. It's the type of weakness that needs to be ironed out of the regional game altogether.
I'm just picking on Cardiff because all they needed to do was regather the ball and shove it up their jumpers.
They'll be glad that they ballsed up here and not in Europe, at least...

^ Tarbh: Leinster were boring. They came 'close' near the end, where O'Driscoll was penalised a metre from the tryline for crawling under a ruck to try to score.
They didn't score any tries though, which I think says it all for you.

 

[dullonien]

Good game, thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a good Blues performance, one they should have won, the ref getting the last penalty wrong. But as Speedy said, the Blues didn't claim the restart leading to that situation, so only themselves to blame. They are looking pretty impressive though, especially with Gethin jenkins starting, Rush back, Martyn Williams to come in and their Mr dependable linout time: Deiniol Jones who will all be playing v Gloucester next week. They are really lacking a quality scrum half, someone like Cooper would be ideal for their needs imo.

It's their defence whoch is most impressive, fine O'Driscoll and Contepomi wriggled their way past a few weak tackles, but their organisation is second to none, always scramble well.

Regarding the Blues try, nothing wrong there. There was no crossing, Molatika wasn't in front of Powell and he didn't change the direction he was running. With those three things out the way, it was a perfactly legit try, a great pass from Nicky setting it up.

 

[An Tarbh]

grinding out wins is all well and good but at some point that's not gonna be enough and given the magnitude of the game this Saturday I wonder whether we'll have enough to get the job done at Twickenham, despite Wasps' current form or lack thereof.

 

[Bluemoon]

Bit gutted that we lost it at the end. Although the penalty was perhaps a bit harsh, there were no excuses for not gathering a restart. Contepomi had an excellent all around game. I was very impressed by him.

Apart from that I thought it was a pretty good Cardiff performance against a very strong Leinster side. Good to see shanklin and Jamie roberts on form, they must be starting at centre against Gloucester next weekend.

Magners may be over for the ***le, but we have alot of home games in which we will finish above the Dragons. We look good going into big money games at least.

Good luck to Leinster, very exciting side and have no shame in losing to them!

 

[snoopy snoopy dog dog]

From a Leinster perspective, the best thing about the game was the fact that they ground out a victory when it looked as though the game had gone away from them. I was impressed with the scrum while O'Brien, Kearney and Contepomi were the pick of the players. The defensive lineouts were strong. Horgan was excellent in defence - less so in attack. Whitaker had his best game in a while. Perhaps the burden of captaincy being lifted from his shoulders did him good. D'arcy looks to be recovering well from his injury. Good to see Leo Cullen get 80 minutes. He must start against Wasps where his leadership will be vital.

Against that, Nacewa was poor, Blaney's darts weren't as accurate as they could have been (although the match was player in a gale) and Heaslip was once again quiet. In my opinion Leinster need to recruit a viable backup number 8 (Keogh isn't the answer) to ease the burden on Heaslip.

All in all, it was a satisfactory result after a less than stellar performance. They're just 2 points off the top of the table right now - so much for Neil Francis' assertion a month ago that they're out of the league ***le race!