22 April 2023; Leinster players huddle during the United Rugby Championship match between Vodacom Bulls and Leinster at Loftus Versfeld Stadium in Pretoria, South Africa. Photo by Harry Murphy/Sportsfile
Gerald Williamson The Bulls getting the 5pts is immaterial in the last league match. What was important for Leinster was to be able to blood new young players and get the experience of playing against a fully loaded Bulls team. This will stand to the Leinster boys.
Andrew Potts My goodness it was still a masterclass of support play and off loading by Bulls. Hopefully Leinster learn from it, because sometimes you learn more from you failures than your victories
Christy O’Connor Wasn’t expecting us to win but also wasn’t expecting such a spanking. I thought Clarkson and Soroka put in a good shift. We definitely learned more in this game than the bulls did. Roll on Toulouse.
Greg Kelly Hardly good for the competition or if you are Connacht or Munster to see the Bulls get 5 points against Leinsters 4ths and leapfrog you in the playoffs when you had to play against the 1sts. I understand giving the young guns a run but there has to be integrity in both the competition and the jersey and that was lacking today.
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The good news for the Leinster kids is that you can’t start passionately disliking the Blue Bulls at too young an age. #BULvLEI
Look, I know we could "afford" this and you can rationalise it away with squad picked etc. But it's still Leinster getting pumped. It's a L. I don't care about "unbeaten" but those lads deserve better caps than meat grinder material. A tough watch hopefully never repeated.
— Jay (Blue Tick No LONGer ) (@Jay_Long_626) April 22, 2023
Leinster's 55 point defeat yesterday was worse than their previous 9 losses combined, going back to June of 2021.
21 January 2023; Garry Ringrose of Leinster scores his side’s sixth try despite the attentions of Christian Wade and Kitione Kamikamica of Racing 92 during the Heineken Champions Cup Pool A Round 4 match between Leinster and Racing 92 at Aviva Stadium in Dublin. Photo by Brendan Moran/Sportsfile
Conor Cronin The number of penalties is a concern. A strong win, and some great individual performances weren’t. We’d a strong first and last 20, needed to be more conscious of the ruck in the middle 40, that’s where we lost our most to Racing. I found a group of Racing fans after the game and brought them to the pub, great group, great fans who really love the game and are very passionate about good rugby, I’m really glad we could meet up expectation, particular the O’Brien try
Gavin Hegarty I actually enjoyed how they challenged us. They clearly did their homework. But still, the good will out. Yes we were not at the level we were last week, but class is permanent. Highlight was ringer flick, sublime.
Richard Collumb Racing slowing the game right down caused us problems. Scrum, some sloppy passing & silly penalties will be punished in later rounds, but last 20 minutes was great. Ringrose just gets better & better.
John Hyland (reply to Richard Collumb) don’t agree re scrum. Other teams are cheating and getting away with it. Our scrum is collapsing on the loosehead side because opposition tightheads are boring in, leaving Porter / Milne nothing to push against. Refs have been clueless.
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Good @leinsterrugby team mentality that Garry Ringrose just shared there "Preparing so it's the best version of ourselves, preparing for the best version of the opposition"! #LEIvR92
Richard Mifsud We weren’t at our best for long periods and credit R92 for parts of that but it’s an 80 minute game and when we clicked it was sublime. We need these tests to keep us honest and sharp it’s about finding a way and thus far this season we’ve been pretty good at that this season. Very satisfying BPW
Koochulainn The numbers do not lie LEINSTER 4 games 20 points (and did not concede a single losing BP) 28 tries +150 points difference #PerfectRecord
RugbyNerd Too good again! But good game for around 60 minutes and good refereeing. Very clear communication.
16 December 2022; Caelan Doris of Leinster makes a break in the build-up to his side’s first try during the Heineken Champions Cup Pool A Round 2 match between Leinster and Gloucester at the RDS Arena in Dublin. Photo by Harry Murphy/Sportsfile
Earlier this year, Gloucester Rugby lock, Ed Slater, announced his retirement from the game with immediate effect after his diagnosis with Motor Neurone Disease (MND).
To help support Ed and his family, Gloucester Rugby opened a JustGiving page and to date over £220,000 has been raised to help support Ed, his wife Jo and their three children.
With Gloucester Rugby playing Leinster Rugby last weekend in the Heineken Champions Cup, both clubs wanted to mark the occasion and also use the opportunity to highlight Ed’s illness and to try and raise even more funds for him and his family.
As a result, two unique Leinster Rugby and Gloucester Rugby jerseys were signed by the match day squads, with both jerseys bearing his name and the number four.
Captains Garry Ringrose and Ben Meehan presented the jerseys to each other before the game and the jerseys will now be used as a raffle item on the Leinster Rugby Instagram account.
To enter, you only need to reply to the post on Instagram and then donate a minimum of £20/€20 to the JustGiving page set up for the Slater family.
The winners will need to show proof of donation before their prize will be allocated to them.
Conor Cronin There are a lot of things to be said about playing the team in front of you, and let’s be honest, the team in front of us were less than brilliant.
But! Let’s acknowledge that they were good for the last 20 mins in a way that they weren’t for the first 60 and kept us relatively quiet. Lots of fans expected 70+ points over the 80 mins and a second string Gloucester kept us very far from that, and that stems from a lack of cohesion, and a few players misfiring at a couple of moments. 50 22 kicks that missed, territorial kicks going dead, passes going loose… There are some things that could be worked on. And there’s no harm in that. Let’s work on simple passes, on making sure that that first receiver’s takes the ball cleanly, that the first receiver is ready for the pass… Let’s make sure that the simple stuff goes right so that against stronger opposition we aren’t losing territory or points
Chris McDonnell Mcgrath is so slow and his pass is awful, he rarely moves the ball to the backs either. It was like watching matt o’connor rugby. How we let patterson go and kept mcgrath baffles me
Kevin Joyce There’s been a lot of talk about what the Gloucester team selection means for the competition. First of all, I’d like to say that I agree that the current format is bad, but it’s absolutely not to blame for what we witnessed tonight. The idea behind the change was to eliminate dead rubbers, but what hope have we of doing that when a team that had a perfect start to the tournament decides to raise the white flag in their second game? As long as the English and French clubs continue to be arrogant enough to believe their domestic leagues are more important than a European competition, no amount of format changes can prevent Gloucester from doing what they did tonight. The only way to completely eliminate dead rubbers would be to add 8 teams and turn the tournament into a straight knockout, but even then, if Gloucester were drawn against Leinster in the first round, they would absolutely surrender and pick a B team like they did tonight, because that’s exactly the kind of club they are and the loser mentality they have. So good luck in the premiership Gloucester, but you’ve about as much chance of winning it as you have of winning the Heineken.
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9 Doris darting, 8 Larmour leaping, 7 Lowe a laughing 6 McGrath marauding, 5 Kelleher conquering , 4 Ryan reaching, 3 Kelleher crossing, 2 van der Flier flying, 1 Lowe a leading, and a Pa-artridge in a pear tree!! 🎄😄 #LEIvGLOhttps://t.co/igiHqH6ywA
I loved that Leinster didn’t kick the ball out when they were 50 points up at the 82min. They showed they were hungry for the game, despite Gloucester fielding that team#LeinsterRugby#LEIvGLO
Absolute humperdinking as expected, but positives: Polledri looks big and strong and gets 80 mins on the clock Gotostev steadied the scrum and looked really powerful carrying. Billy, Atkinson and Clement all had great games. It was all a bit men against boys though#LEIvGLO 🍒⚪️
Brian Nisbet 57-0 at the RDS. Gloucester disrespected the competition and their opposition with their team selection and paid the price. Not going to complain about a BP win for Leinster, but I do feel sorry for the slaughtered lambs
RichardMifsud Venerunt vidimus vicimus. The 57 was obviously pleasing, the 0 infinitely more so. Gloucester brought an under strength team and got what they deserved (not having a go). You have to feel for their players TBH. We weren’t at our best yet that was more than enough to beat Gloucester. Greater tests await For now Merry Xmas
HARPIN' ON RUGBY 