When the game was there to be taken, Toulouse stood tall
Leinster add to final trauma as mentality bites
At the end, Leo Cullen and Jacques Nienaber stood side by side at the edge of Ange Postecoglou’s technical area watching their side playing for a title they could no longer win as the clock ticked into the 101st minute.
For the Leinster head coach, this was a familiar feeling and for the South African something entirely new and unpleasant.
He’s used to winning tight games, but that remains a skill that evades this Leinster team whose relationship with this tournament is becoming traumatic.
Between them, the two men had ripped up the club’s template in an attempt to change their repeated stoNienaber’s ry of heartbreak on the biggest days and yet here they were preparing to watch another pair of hands reach for the trophy they covet the most.
Their wait stretches into a seventh year and they face another excruciating period of internal introspection and external questions about their mentality when it comes to the crunch.
Ten metres away from where the two men stood, a mass of men in red and black stood ready to celebrate a sixth European title and across the 100-plus minutes they deserved their moment.
The sewing machine will stay in a cupboard at UCD, there will be no fifth star on the jersey and it is the French side who earn the right to call themselves the heavyweights of European rugby.
For this was their sixth title, a second in four seasons, and perhaps the one they’ll relish the most given their recent record of defeats to Leinster.
In those games, it was Stuart Lancaster’s attack that had shredded the French heavyweights as Leinster put up big scores on home soil.
The neutral venue definitely levelled the playing field, but the worrying signs that had hung over the province’s work with ball in hand all season were on show here.
In the 95 th minute, they coughed up their 17 th turnover when Rónan Kelleher popped a ball out of a crumbling maul to a stranded Cian Healy who was enveloped in red. Julian Marchand came up with a poach penalty, which Thomas Ramos gleefully accepted, and by the time Josh van der Flier knocked on for their 18th and final error, the day was done.
fingerprints were all over the good parts of their performance; there were stunning moments of scramble defence from Jamison Gibson-Park and Jordan Larmour to deny certain tries at either end of normal time.
Their kick-chase pressure game was phenomenal, with Larmour justifying his selection and Gibson-Park putting on an exhibition, while their scrum won them penalties at key moments, taking the game to the wire.
There were exceptional individual displays, with Caelan Doris and Robbie Henshaw taking the game to their opponents, Andrew Porter defying the laws of sports science and Ryan Baird and Dan Sheehan pulling off moments of excellence.
And yet, they limited Toulouse to 15 points and couldn’t muster more themselves.
It all would be remembered so differently had they perhaps taken their time when engineering a drop-goal for Ciarán Frawley who had sharpened their attack after coming on for the injured Ross Byrne midway through the second half.
For a brief second, it looked like the Skerries native’s kick was heading between the posts, but as his hands went to his head it began to drift left.
So, we were set for extra time and if the 80 minutes had been dominated by the wasteful men in blue the 20-plus minutes of additional time belonged to Toulouse.
And, as unfair as it may seem to critique players’ decision-making in split-second moments when they’ve been existing in that cauldron for that long, there can be no denying that it was the French side who stepped up when the game was there to be won.
James Lowe’s yellow card proved a fatal blow, the Ireland winger just couldn’t resist the temptation to stick out a paw and knock on Antoine Dupont’s wide pass and, once he was gone, the response was more ruthless than anything Leinster had mustered all day.
They were down to 13 briefly as Frawley lay prone with a head injury sustained tackling the brilliant Blair Kinghorn and the men in red went for the jugular, flashing it wide where Matthis Lebel scorched over.
Ramos made it a 10-point game, but the game looked like it had turned on another card when Richie Arnold’s connected with Cian Healy’s head at a ruck and saw red.
The Irish side kept playing deep into injury-time and got their reward through Van der Flier’s try and Frawley’s conversion, heading into the second half of injury time three points down and with a man extra in their ranks.
What followed will stay with them every bit as much as images of Ronan O’Gara celebrating in the wake of their collapses in the last two years against La Rochelle.
Dupont’s pin-point kicking put Hugo Keenan into positions he didn’t want to be, Doris chased a ruck that wasn’t there to be chased and Ramos punished him. When Marchand made his move after another clever kick from the Toulouse captain, it was put beyond reach.
It will haunt them that they never led, that they repeatedly visited the Toulouse 22 and came away with either nothing or had to settle for three points.
They will wonder about referee Matt Carley’s decision to rule out James Lowe’s try in first-half injury time for a knock-on that never materialised satisfactorily on a replay, but if they’re being honest with themselves they’ll know that they had enough chances to win it in normal time and they blew each and every one of them.
There will be some solace that their victors were so good and that they lost to a team that is led by perhaps the greatest rugby player of them all.
In a game of incredible attrition, it was Dupont who had a succession of sensational moments with his hands, his boot, his defence and at the breakdown and maul where he got stuck in and turned the ball over.
He justified every bit of hype about him on the biggest stage.
Once again, Leinster couldn’t do the same as they slipped to a third successive final defeat and a fourth in six years on a crushing day in north London.