It’s safe to say Leinster head coach Leo Cullen was extremely disappointed on Friday night after his side were thumped 35-0 by the Stormers in Cape Town in the opening round of the URC, in what was one of Leinster’s heaviest defeats in recent memory.
The defending URC champions were missing some of their key men, but fielded a side that should have been strong enough to at least compete. And they did, for the opening 40 minutes, as the visitors went in at the break at a respectable 6-0 down.
Leinster shipped 29 points in the second half and failed to fire a single shot, as the Stormers scored four tries to claim a winning bonus point in their first game of the season.
Stefan Ungerer, Evan Roos, Ruan Ackermann and Jurie Matthee all crossed over, while Leinster’s Max Deegan and Tommy O’Brien were sent to the sin bin in the second half, with Leinster at one stage down to 13 players.
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Leo Cullen issues brutal verdict after Leinster thumped by Stormers
Leinster Head Coach Leo Cullen was brutally honest in his post-match comments to Premier Sports after his side’s shocking defeat.
“We were pretty poor now overall, I thought,” he said.
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“Credit to the Stormers, I thought they were pretty outstanding today. We have a challenge at the start of the season for a lot of guys coming in playing their first game of the season, but listen, I don’t want to make excuses because we were, as I said, very much second best in pretty much every department today.”
Speaking on the specifics of the game, Cullen thought his side started “okay”:
“We got some access down in the 22; we were just not quite accurate enough, and that sort of stayed with us through the whole game. The Stormers put us under a huge amount of pressure; we just didn’t manage with it very well. I thought the Stormers were much sharper across the board in all the contact points, and when you’re losing the momentum, we’re just on the back foot the whole game, and then we’re still misfiring on a few different set-piece parts as well.”
Up next for Leinster is a trip to Pretoria to play last year’s finalists, the Bulls. “We’ll look after ourselves and put a good plan together because we’ve got to turn the page to next week pretty quickly.”
Cullen said he was “hugely disappointed” with the result, but insisted there was “a long way to go” in the competition.
“But yeah, we haven’t conceded a score like that in quite a while, the guys are hurting inside the dressing room,” he said.
Not the start Leinster and Cullen would have wanted, and the Bulls will smell blood in the water next week. It will be a huge boost for the Irish province to get their A-listers back after next week.
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