Deep in the bowels of the wonderful Estadio San Mamés on Saturday night stood Cian Healy, reflecting on his fourth European Champions Cup triumph as a player after Leinster’s 15-12 victory over Racing 92. No team, let alone an individual, has ever won five but, according to Healy, this side have barely started.
“The plan is to put a lot of stars on the shirt – not four, not five. I want to see Leinster grow and be dominant in Europe for years. The crop that are coming through … long after I’m gone they’ll hopefully be doing that.”
Hats off to Leinster after giving Racing’s beret brigade the boot | Paul Rees
It is easy to see where such confidence and optimism springs from. Not only do Healy’s team have seasoned gunslingers like himself and Johnny Sexton but they also have young players threatening to rewrite the laws of professional rugby gravity. James Ryan, the 21-year-old lock, has now played 21 senior matches for Ireland and Leinster and won them all, earning a Six Nations grand slam and Champions Cup medal in the process. With Ryan, Dan Leavy, Garry Ringrose, Robbie Henshaw and Jordan Larmour all 24 or younger, the future for Irish rugby is not so much bright as luminous.
Given they have already become just the second team in European club history to go through an entire nine-match campaign with a 100% record and also have a home Pro14 semi-final against Munster this Saturday, it hardly needed Healy to suggest that Ryan, in particular, could develop into a serious talent. “I first saw him at Clontarf and he was a string bean – skinny, tall, talented. When you see him step up to the plate it’s jaw-dropping. It’s a case of: ‘Hold on a second, he doesn’t look like he can do what he’s doing.’ It’s class. Eventually he’ll lose a game and we’ll pick him up and dust him off and send him out again.”
Equally fascinating to non-Irish eyes is the breakdown of Ryan’s 21 winning games: eight for Ireland, nine in this season’s Champions Cup and just four in the Pro14. His English equivalent would be playing far more league minutes, assuming he could oust the highly paid Kiwi or South African import ahead of him, and enjoying rather fewer restorative weekends off.
Credit also has to go to the coaches supervising the development of Ireland’s glittering young things. Leinster’s director of rugby, Leo Cullen, and his lead coach, Stuart Lancaster, are fortunate to have such exciting raw material at their disposal but very little of it goes to waste. “We want guys to play for Leinster and Ireland a long time, so we need to make sure we pick our battles with our guys,” stressed Cullen, as excited as anyone else by Ryan’s potential. “We are lucky to have him, he is a very special talent.”
The only slight cloud on Leinster’s horizon is the need to replace the retiring Isa Nacewa, another four-time European winner and perhaps the most underrated player of his generation. With Nacewa on the field his team rarely, if ever, look flustered and, appropriately, it was the captain who kicked the two crucial late penalties which finally floored Racing after Sexton had tweaked his groin and handed over the kicking duties.
Sexton and Nacewa kick Leinster to Champions Cup glory against Racing 92
If the first European final to be played on Spanish soil was not an expansive classic it was never less than thunderous. They love a bullfight in the Basque country and this nostril-flaring, head-down collision was not one for fragile matadors. Racing lost Dan Carter before kick-off to a hamstring strain, had their South African fly-half Pat Lambie hobble off with a knee injury which is set to rule him out for the rest of the calendar year and were also missing their linchpin Maxime Machenaud at scrum-half.
In the circumstances they could be proud of their efforts, undermined only by a late rush of blood by Teddy Thomas who, with the score locked at 12-12, tried to run the ball in his own 22 and gifted Leinster the position from which Nacewa landed the killer blow. “He [Thomas] is a young player and I hope this experience will be useful for him in the future with us and France,” muttered the Racing coach, Laurent Labit.
Leinster’s young players have no such issues and are also mature enough to know how to win ugly when required. Even Healy is not overly keen to watch a rerun – “I’ll keep a romantic view of it… it was like winning a fight without throwing a punch” – but he knows a proper rugby team when he sees one. Irish rugby, both at national provincial level, has never had it so good.