At face value, last Sunday’s facile win against Montpellier cannot have served much purpose for the competition or more pertinently for Leinster, other than dusting off the cobwebs after a month-long, mid-season hiatus. Running in a try every six minutes or so won’t have prepared them for a concluding Pool A trek to the Rec to face Bath next Saturday, much less potentially sterner tests in the knock-out stages.
But Felipe Contepomi, Leinster’s assistant coach, maintains there are two ways of looking at this.
“Yeah, they [Montpellier] weren’t maybe the team you would expect them to be but at the same time, we played some very good rugby. It’s easy now to say that Montpellier weren’t good enough. But we had a game where we played nearly 40 minutes of ball-in-play, where the average they play is 30 minutes or less.
“So when you take a team that’s not used to playing 40 minutes ball-in-play to that kill zone, and from minute one, maybe that exp …
- January 19, 2022
