Leo Cullen looked a little bit lighter on Friday night after Leinster retained their BKT United Rugby Championship title.
After a season of ups and downs, his side saved their best performance for the final day of the season as they thrashed the Bulls 36-7 at Croke Park to make it back-to-back URC titles, their tenth championship across the various iterations of this league.
The layout of the season hasn’t helped the narrative around Leinster in recent years.
It’s not to discredit the URC, but the Investec Champions Cup remains their white whale. Their celebrations on Saturday night were fulsome and thoroughly deserved, and no doubt a huge release of emotion, four weeks on from their devastation in Bilbao.
The way the season falls, the biggest day of the season isn’t necessarily the final one.
As much as they would have liked to, they couldn’t shuttle away to the summer after their defeat to Bordeaux-Begles, with three games and four more weeks of URC rugby to come, during which that game continued to follow them.
It’s a tough ask to come back and face three more games of knockout rugby, but it did offer them the chance to right some wrongs, even if it didn’t erase the pain of what happened in Bilbao.
It also didn’t help that for each of those three games and four weeks, the questions kept coming about the Champions Cup, even as they tried to put their focus on the URC.
With a quarter-final against the Lions falling seven days after that European final, there wasn’t enough time for a full deep-dive until last week, where there was a 13-day gap between the URC semi-final and final.
Emotions were running high after that defeat, as the Leinster coaches and players were peppered with questions about yet another missed chance to land the big one.
There were some tetchy exchanges with reporters from Leo Cullen (above) and Jacques Nienaber in the week after that game, and after Friday’s win at Croke Park, Cullen explained why he let his frustrations get the better of him.
“I had a grumpy press conference after the Lions game,” the Leinster head coach said.
“That was an eight o’clock kick-off. The game finished at 10. I’d been at a 30-year school reunion the day before, where I maybe had one or two too many!
“I might have been a bit grumpier that day so there are always reasons for that, if someone says something. And I was very emotional towards the tail end of this season. There’s lots of different reasons for that.
“That’s just sometimes what happens. It comes out.
“I definitely think there’s a real love for the team. We are protective of the team, if someone says something not nice about us.
“I was slagging [Simon] Zebo off there because a lot of it is formed off the Munster trolls, would be my feeling. But that’s just life, we just got to deal with it.
“It’s a very different landscape, isn’t it? People can fire out whatever is going through their mind at any moment in time these days. The landscape is different, we know that, but I shouldn’t be sensitive. I’m being critical of myself. Let’s be positive. It’s a great day.”
Given the resources available to the province and the standards previous teams have set, there’s a slim margin between what defines success and failure for Leinster.
Leinster are the first back-to-back champions of the URC era
And Cullen was delighted by the resilience shown by his group over the last month.
“I think it’s a testament to the work that goes on with the backroom team, the playing group, pushing each other on, showing the right characteristics,” he added.
“Caelan [Doris] touched on it, having people that are putting the team first, because there’s a lot of tight selections during the course of a season.
“People can’t show up and think it will be grand, they need to be ready, need to prepare the team well.
“That’s what you just keep leaning into as a group, because that’s what gets you consistently to the big days. Because the juggling of two things is a challenge, but it is a great challenge to try and take on.
“Unfortunately, we had a really poor time in Bilbao, but we still need to continue to try and learn from that. So we need to keep improving. It’s all about what we want to do.
“It goes back to the work that takes place day in, day out, day in, day out, show the right characteristics, go for work, really enjoy yourself, give all of yourself. And that’s what it’s all about, that the beauty of sport. The privilege we have to be involved in a sports team.
“Not take things too seriously or too personal. Just enjoy the ride, because we’re so fortunate to be here at the end of the season.
“You’re playing in Croke Park, and you get a proper – likes hairs standing on the back of your neck – through that feeling of love from the crowd, which is people are very passionate about it which is fantastic.”