The thing that Leo Cullen won't apologise for... and he's right

Leo Cullen wasn’t having any of it, Anglo-Irish potshots about the dominance of the Leinster operation. Last weekend, it was the Ulster boss Dan McFarland withering on about demographics and such in the wake of his team’s Heineken Champions Cup round-of-16 pasting. This time around, it was interim Leicester coach Richard Wigglesworth having a whine about money after his Tigers had been savagely shredded in the quarter-finals.

It didn’t sit well with the long-in-the-tooth Cullen. Now 45 and nearing the end of his eighth season in charge of the province he represented as a player from 1998 to 2014 (bar a two-year mid-career stint at Leicester), he damn well knows what it’s like to be an also ran.

He was in the trenches on multiple occasions when the province was written off as a banter club, a bunch of underachievers caught up in their own D4 celebrity and not adept at the real business of winning rugby matches. That, at the time, was the preserve of Ulster and Leicester, clubs that respectively conquered Europe in 1999 and 2001 & 2002.

Leinster, in stark contrast, were nowhere and even when they did threaten a rising, they humiliatingly botched it. So much so Cullen admitted the other night to still having the match programme from the 2003 Lansdowne Road semi-final crash to Perpignan by his desk reminding him of an awkwardness that left him embarrassed to head outside his front door.

He, for sure, has the itchy scars of those dark Leinster days and it’s the very reason why he now won’t make apologies for his club being so good at what they do, reaching a sixth European semi-final in seven seasons and topping the URC heading into the quarter-finals.

They have had to work damn hard to be a consistent success on the pitch and their popularity off it hasn’t come easy either, Cullen explaining how low RDS crowds last June prompted them to take a very hard look in the mirror and vow to connect better with their fanbase. With Friday’s 27,000 attendance having merrily skipped away into the long holiday weekend, the woe-is-us quotes from McFarland and Wigglesworth were tossed in Cullen’s direction at his post-game media debrief. There was an initial incredulous laugh. Then he swatted the curveball out of the park.

“I don’t know,” he chuckled before getting all serious. “Not long ago we were having a conversation about the (negative) gulf between us and other teams, French teams in particular.

“English rugby is going through a tricky patch at the moment, so they have had to shrink their budgets on the back of what has gone on in the game, you know I mean, clubs going out of business. That’s called sensible business, isn’t it? Yeah, I don’t know.

“We are just focusing on trying to do what we can. I always think we are only scratching the surface of what potential we have. One of the things leading into this season we were most conscious of, if you think back to the tail end of last season where we were struggling for crowds.

“Like we had what, 6,000 against Glasgow and whatever it was, 9,000 or 10,000 against the Bulls. So we went to have a good look at ourselves because there was some sort of disconnect there.

“Were we not doing enough to get out and about, to really engage with supporters and the 12-county part of Leinster? Maybe we weren’t doing enough in that space, so we tried to push that. So that is what I am focused on.

“I’m not really focused on what other teams are doing, other teams are saying. I’m focused on what we can do, what we can do better because that is what is in our control so we will continue to do that. So, what other teams say, it’s sort of wasted energy me commenting on it, isn’t it?”

But why are Leinster now so dominant compared to bleak times past? “We are very fortunate we have got a great staff. There is a group of people there who are unbelievably passionate about the team. Like, we have players who are unbelievably passionate about playing for Leinster which is what you want and that is probably a legacy piece over time.

Man in the bin…1??0?? points in the bag@LeinsterRugby are ruthless ?#HeinekenChampionsCup pic.twitter.com/EhLR55M7qb

— Investec Champions Cup (@ChampionsCup) April 7, 2023

“Like, 20 years ago, 2003, we lost a semi-final here against Perpignan. I was involved in the game and you were a little bit ashamed of walking out your front door because we underachieved. We were watching other provinces lifting the European Cup. Ulster, late 90s. That is off the back of Ulster winning what, 10 interpros in a row, 10 or 11 in the 80s/90s which is when I started watching rugby. That is my formative years of watching rugby – complete domination by Ulster.

“More recently if you think about that period, 2003, Munster were the dominant province in Ireland, weren’t they? We got beaten by Perpignan that day 20 years ago in a semi-final. I’ll look for where that programme is, I have it somewhere. I can tell you exactly where it is – it is sitting by my desk at the moment because they stick in the memory. People have short memories. I, unfortunately, have a longer one.

“It’s a moment in time, isn’t it? But in terms of the coaching piece, we have coaches there who were working the game on Friday but they trained another group of players that morning, so there is a huge amount of work that goes into it. So it is not just by accident either.

“We had a number of young guys, academy players, sub-academy players, and you have Stuart (Lancaster), Robin (McBryde), Andrew Goodman, all the academy coaches out there delivering a session, going through some of the things we want to focus on over the next couple of weeks with that group.

“So yeah, it’s hard work. There is no secret to success. You have got to have people who are willing to put in hard work and yeah, the minute you get complacent there is someone else waiting to take your spot.

“What would you say Ulster’s domination in the 80s and 90s was based on? Probably a really strong group of players that worked really hard for each other and all the rest. That is what we are trying to create here and have all the time, a strong group of players that want to work hard for each other. It’s not rocket science.

“Munster, what was that based on? A strong group of players that worked incredibly hard for it. We were hugely envious of that at the time, and they had a period of domination for what, 10, 12 years. People have funny memories.”

Funny memories. Sour grape potshots. Leo Cullen definitely isn’t having any of it.