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Jake White: 'There’s one thing Leinster taught me tonight'

Willie Le Roux of Vodacom Bulls after his side's defeat in the United Rugby Championship match between Leinster and Vodacom Bulls at the RDS Arena in Dublin. (Photo By Harry Murphy/Sportsfile via Getty Images)

Jake White, the Bulls’ Director of Rugby, said his side was not in pieces after their disappointing loss at the hands of Leinster in their United Rugby Championship clash at the RDS Arena in Dublin this past Friday.

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Instead, he reminded all that his team was still second on the log with a host of big guns waiting for them in the next month.

“We are not in pieces,” White said emphatically.

“We are traveling back, we are second on the log, we played against a team that beats most teams nine out of ten times, I think nine and a half times out of ten times.

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Jake White on Leinster experience

Video Spacer

Jake White on Leinster experience

“We are not going to get down on ourselves. We didn’t win today and we’ve got to be humble about it.

“It’s not doom and gloom. This is a benchmark of where the clubs wants to be. It takes years and years of work.”

White said if one had to look at the history of Leinster, they are a club that built themselves up over time.

“What we do need is time. This hasn’t happened overnight for Leinster.

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“Look at that bench, it reminds me of that Springbok bench when you just bring on more internationals, and not just any internationals, proper internationals.

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“We are going to have to learn from that, I am not talking about rugby learning, also just learning as a club of how we can get to those heights.”

Asked what he thought the role of former Springbok coach Jacques Nienaber has been on quality of Leinster rugby, White said it was a very clever move of their head coach Leo Cullen to bring in someone with the inside knowledge of South African rugby.

“Leinster hasn’t gone from being average to now becoming the real deal overnight. I mean, they have been winning 95% of their games the last couple of years.

“All Jacques will do I’m sure is top up on that 95%. I just think it’s a very astute move by Leo [Cullen],to bring in a chap of the intricacies of what works for the Springboks,” White said.

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“They haven’t won tournaments, but to be fair, there aren’t a lot of teams that can brag about beating Leinster over the last couple of seasons.”

White also refereed to the quality of Leinster’s replacements compared to the young guns of the Bulls.

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Last 5 Meetings

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Average Points scored
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First try wins
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Home team wins
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“One of the things that do work is a bench of Malcolm Marx and those sort of guys, RG Snyman and you guys [Leinster] did it to us tonight.

“They were far more experienced than the group I could put on.

“It’s a very different team to the one we played last time, it’s two years older. And that’s why I say we need time.

“There’s one thing Leinster taught me tonight, and again reaffirmed, is the ability for them to go from defence into the attack, it was phenomenal.

“Every time we made a mistake they punished us.

“Every time they transitioned from a bad kick or a turn-over ball, they literally got away with points.”

White was adamant that his side will bounce back – they just had to learn from the mistakes and build on the experience of playing these big teams.

“We will be better.

“There’s a lot of learnings.

“It’s probably a good lesson for us to play Leinster before we play Lyon in a knock-out game because the next week, if we get through, we play the winner of Northampton and Munster.

“And that’s not going to be easy. And the following week we play Munster again in the URC.

“So literally the next month is not going to be any different to what we experienced today in terms of intensity, in terms of accuracy, in terms of pressure. So those are the lessons that we will have to put into our planning.”

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Comments

2 Comments
L
Lesang 269 days ago

I know the Bulls will definitely take the lessons from Leinster & build on it. They were the most successful SA team in super rugby as they won the championship 3 times. Their position on the log suggests that they are on the right path but it will take few years before they catch up with the best teams from the NH.

J
Joseph 273 days ago

Well said, Jake. No excuses, no breast-beating, just a humble acknowledgement that the Bulls came last. And I’d rather that inexperience is dealt with by Jake than have it passed on to Rassie.

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AllyOz 19 hours ago
Does the next Wallabies coach have to be an Australian?

I will preface this comment by saying that I hope Joe Schmidt continues for as long as he can as I think he has done a tremendous job to date. He has, in some ways, made the job a little harder for himself by initially relying on domestic based players and never really going over the top with OS based players even when he relaxed his policy a little more. I really enjoy how the team are playing at the moment.


I think Les Kiss, because (1) he has a bit more international experience, (2) has previously coached with Schmidt and in the same setup as Schmidt, might provide the smoothest transition, though I am not sure that this necessarily needs to be the case.


I would say one thing though about OS versus local coaches. I have a preference for local coaches but not for the reason that people might suppose (certainly not for the reason OJohn will have opined - I haven't read all the way down but I think I can guess it).


Australia has produced coaches of international standing who have won World Cups and major trophies. Bob Dwyer, Rod Macqueen, Alan Jones, Michael Cheika and Eddie Jones. I would add John Connolly - though he never got the international success he was highly successful with Queensland against quality NZ opposition and I think you could argue, never really got the run at international level that others did (OJohn might agree with that bit). Some of those are controversial but they all achieved high level results. You can add to that a number of assistants who worked OS at a high level.


But what the lack of a clear Australian coach suggests to me is that we are no longer producing coaches of international quality through our systems. We have had some overseas based coaches in our system like Thorn and Wessels and Cron (though I would suggest Thorn was a unique case who played for Australia in one code and NZ in the other and saw himself as a both a NZer and a Queenslander having arrived here at around age 12). Cron was developed in the Australian system anyway, so I don't have a problem with where he was born.


But my point is that we used to have systems in Australia that produced world class coaches. The systems developed by Dick Marks, which adopted and adapted some of the best coaching training approaches at the time from around the world (Wales particularly) but focussed on training Australian coaches with the best available methods, in my mind (as someone who grew up and began coaching late in that era) was a key part of what produced the highly skilled players that we produced at the time and also that produced those world class coaches. I think it was slipping already by the time I did my Level II certificate in 2002 and I think Eddie Jones influence and the priorities of the executive, particularly John O'Neill, might have been the beginning of the end. But if we have good coaching development programmes at school and junior level that will feed through to representative level then we will have


I think this is the missing ingredient that both ourselves and, ironically, Wales (who gave us the bones of our coaching system that became world leading), is a poor coaching development system. Fix that and you start getting players developing basic skills better and earlier in their careers and this feeds through all the way through the system and it also means that, when coaching positions at all levels come up, there are people of quality to fill them, who feed through the system all the way to the top. We could be exporting more coaches to Japan and England and France and the UK and the USA, as we have done a bit in the past.


A lack of a third tier between SR and Club rugby might block this a little - but I am not sure that this alone is the reason - it does give people some opportunity though to be noticed and play a key role in developing that next generation of players coming through. And we have never been able to make the cost sustainable.


I don't think it matters that we have an OS coach as our head coach at the moment but I think it does tell us something about overall rugby ecosystem that, when a coaching appointment comes up, we don't have 3 or 4 high quality options ready to take over. The failure of our coaching development pathway is a key missing ingredient for me and one of the reasons our systems are failing.

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