Leo Cullen hailed the attitude of his Leinster players as they staged a second-half comeback for the second week in a row, but the head coach admitted his side can’t make a habit of it.
Tries in the final quarter of an hour from James Lowe and Dan Sheehan saw his side come from 20-12 down to defeat Ulster 24-20 in a thrilling Christmas inter-pro at Aviva Stadium, and deliver a bonus-point win to the defending champions.
“I suppose we’re learning to win in a slightly different way, anyway, nine points down last week, 10 points down this week, which is great,” Cullen said after his side’s fifth win in a row in all competitions.
As thrilling as the last two wins have been, the results have papered over cracks in performance, particularly late in this first half this week as a series of individual errors allowed a pair of Ulster tries, which gave the northern province a 17-7 lead at the break.
And Cullen (below) was quick to stress that while he was thrilled with the bonus-point victory, his feelings on the performance were much different.
“It is not the way you ideally want to play every week.
“Guys are trying a little bit too hard at times, you know, rather than just being patient.
“We can wear some of these teams down. So we’re trying a little bit too hard. And then suddenly we’re getting ourselves in trouble because we’re forcing things that are not necessarily on, and then Ulster scored three tries in the first half. And that gets us into that situation where we’re 10 points down.
“You’re not going to get away with that week on week. So we need to be better, clearly.
“There’s a couple of games now we’ve got ourselves in trouble with some of our own looseness and Munster in Croke Park is probably the one, more than anything, that’s probably one of the games where we were probably most loose with the ball.
“So if we’re loose with the ball again next week against Munster, we know what’s going to happen to us because we’ve already seen it happen to us.
“It’s a great outcome from the game, but performance, listen, we need to get a hell of a lot better yet,” he added.
The game was decided by the replacements with Leinster rolling Tadhg Furlong (below), Dan Sheehan and brothers Joe and Paddy McCarthy off the bench early in the second half, and then Harry Byrne, as they eventually wore down an impressive, but ultimately inexperienced Ulster squad.
“I thought the bench guys came on did well,” Cullen said.
“We had guys on the bench, we had some good experience there because we know Ulster are riding high at the moment, and we knew we would need impact potentially.
“Ideally, we would be 10 points up and we’re able to kick on with the bench, but that’s not the way it was.
“So I thought there was good composure within that. Even when James Ryan goes to the bin, I’m watching that thinking I’m struggling to see a huge amount of illegality in that. I don’t know what you guys think.
“It’s the composure within that part when we’re down to 14 men, which was really pleasing.”
Ulster head coach Richie Murphy had a similar opinion on where the game was won and lost.
“There’s no doubt that their bench has a massive impact in the back end of the game,” Murphy (below) said.
“And from an experience and point of view, we’re at very different levels of players coming onto the pitch.
“You know, Joe Hopes has two caps and he comes on against Joe McCarthy, who’s the Irish international.
“I thought we played some really good rugby in the first half and obviously get out to a lead.
“There were a couple of crucial moments in the second half; one, Rob Baloucoune just can’t quite get the ball away for two-man overlap down around the outside and there’s one then where we throw it on the ground off a five-man [lineout].
“Two great opportunities to sort of go deep into Leinster’s 22 and possibly score.
“We went away a little bit from what we were doing in the first half and we didn’t look after the ball well enough in that second half.
“Discipline a little bit hurt us as well throughout the game.”
It’s just a second URC defeat of the season for Murphy’s side, who face two more inter-pros across the festive period, travelling to Galway to face Connacht on St Stephen’s Day, while they also host Munster on 2 January.
And the Ulster boss is confident this defeat won’t linger with his players over Christmas.
“Those guys will learn from this experience and we’ll get better. That’s what we’ve said at the start of the season, is that we improve every week. So it definitely won’t deflate us.
“It definitely won’t knock us off track. We just need to regroup, learn from the mistakes that were in this game and just try and prepare the best we can for Connacht,” he added.