Leinster vs Toulouse: A Pre-eminent Dynasty and European Heritage

Leinster and Toulouse clash in a rematch of last year's Champions Cup semi-final, and a battle of European rugby royalty.

Happy Friday. Please enjoy this week’s offering on Leinster vs Toulouse, one of this weekend’s Champions Cup semi-finals.

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Memory often hides the imperfections of history. It conceals its scars and blemishes until the image is smoothed, or rather, distorted completely. The narrative it weaves so often deviates from the facts, the stone cold truths of yesterday, becoming something else entirely. A tapestry braided from non-existent threads.

Leinster encapsulate this. It’s rugby and its power feels everlasting and inescapable. The pre-eminent rugby force of its era. For this is an international team wrapped neatly in domestic colours, the blue of Leinster barely containing the green shamrock, with an ongoing wave of fresh dominance that feels unrelenting.

Of course, no team’s supremacy is eternal. But until the day that Leinster no longer make semi-finals and breeze through the regular season with ease, theirs will feel perpetual.

That the club, forever favourites, have not won a European trophy since 2018 matters little in the overarching story playing out. The five-year drought feels like a mere footnote in the chronicle of modern rugby that is still being written.

Forgotten too, is that only a year ago the province closed in on yet another double, only to fall short at both hurdles - losing to La Rochelle in the final moments in Marseille, and being shocked by the Bulls at home in the URC semi-finals. As is that even roughly a decade ago it was Munster who ruled Irish rugby, and Europe was once the domain of Saracens.

These are minor details, trivial even. The tag of favourites, sat beside four golden stars, will indelibly adorn Leinster’s chest no matter how long their drought lasts.

The side could, in theory, lose this weekend and we’ll be having these same conversations a year from now. The province are a dynasty that, somehow, is both established and insurgent.

So, with home advantage, they enter this weekend cautiously backed to make it past Toulouse, as they did so last season, and return to the Aviva on 20th May with a palpable fifth star in reach.

When the backline clicks, which is more often than not, they’re irresistible. Fullback Hugo Keenan plucks the ball out of the sky seemingly with ease. The footwork of Garry Ringrose in rugby’s most cohesive backline, his cannonball-cum-centre partner Robbie Henshaw beside him, spearheads Leinster’s offensive moves.

Toulouse will need to cut the engine before Leinster can even put the key into ignition. With the Dubliner’s possession heavy system and emphasis on quick front-foot ball, the battle at the breakdown will be of huge importance.

As much as they may be reluctant to do so, the visitors will need to emulate domestic rivals La Rochelle, who seem to have Leinster’s number due to their disruption at the ruck. That task will fall largely to the trifecta of Antoine Dupont, Julien Marchand, and Emmanuel Meafou, who’ve won 20 turnovers between them in the Champions Cup this year, and hit an incredible amount of rucks.

Ugo Mola, Toulouse’s head coach, will also hope the absence of Johnny Sexton and James Lowe will disrupt Leinster’s patterns, shifting momentum in his side’s favour. However, Jordan Larmour’s intricate movements will make up for the loss of Lowe, and Ross Byrne, who for some time now has helmed the blue machine in Sexton’s place, will lead the attack without much issue.

Leinster’s pack too, like the backline, provides the bulk of the Irish team, is too fast and too furious for most other’s in European rugby.

In this, Leinster and Toulouse mirror each other. Outside of their growing intercontinental club rivalry, the pair represent a extension of the Six Nations power struggle between Ireland and France. Leinster making up much of the Irish side; and the same with Toulouse for France.

The answer to this tie, and the ways to unlock it, could very well lie in Ireland’s clash with France in Dublin earlier this year.

There are those, whether they want to admit it or not, who will already be looking past Toulouse this weekend - one eye already on a momentous lifting of the trophy in the Aviva - confident that home-advantage will be the arrowhead to fatally pierce the French side’s armour.

Leinster have a habit of making one contort common sense. The allure of their on-pitch control and of our human, natural inclination to favour what comes most recently means victory for them at times feels inevitable.

Leo Cullen, the province’s head coach who rarely speaks as candidly as he has recently, is of course denouncing that view. Cullen made the curious choice to speak at a press conference at the beginning of this week - what he had to say presumably couldn’t wait until he addressed the media at the end of this week.

“Everyone is going on, waxing lyrical about the semi-final [when Leinster comprehensively beat Toulouse last year] and it was as if we had to just turn up for the final.

“But again, you’re going up against a team like La Rochelle in the final, unbelievably heavily-resourced, top French players, top foreign players. That’s what you’re up against. You’re up against the top teams and they only lap up all that media stuff that all you guys have delivered. The hype is… you’ve got to control it. That’s the game.”

Cullen wouldn’t agree presumably, but the URC itself, where Leinster sometimes resemble a megalodon amongst great whites, has morphed into a competition that a team does not win, but one that Leinster loses. In that, there is Manchester City-like quality to the Dubliners.

And if Leinster are Manchester City, who reign supreme over the domestic scene but are eluded by concrete success abroad, then Stade Toulousain are most certainly the team that City will soon face in the Champions League semi-finals, Real Madrid.

Each the most successful in their respective sport’s European competition, and each possessing an otherworldly and special relationship to that tournament.

Like Real Madrid, Toulouse habitually refrain from showing their entire arsenal of weapons at a given time, instead preferring to give you glimpses of its excellence. A dart from Dupont here, an understated slice of the sublime from Thomas Ramos there. The emphasis is on the individual.

In a flash, without warning signs, no auguries or harbingers, Toulouse find method in its magic and madness and cut teams apart.

Against the Cell C Sharks in the quarter-final, Toulouse led by just six points with 12 minutes left on the clock. The South Africans had made use of their quickness and smoothness in transitions to keep within distance of the French. They had kept pace with Dupont and co.

But sometimes keeping pace is all you can do until the fated hand of reality intervenes. The thought of Toulouse losing at that stage is chaos, and at that point chaos had to give way to order. Instead of the tense finale that the previous 68 minutes signalled it may be, an oppressive and murderous flash of rouge splattered across the visitors. Dupont, Ramos, and Roman Ntamack ran wild with broken-field brilliance.

Toulouse do not have the God-given right to win games or trophies, but it’s their belief that they do, that their collective flair and talent demands it, that often empowers them to do so.

Toulouse, like Leinster, warp history around themselves. Five stars illuminate their chest, superior to Leinster’s four. Beating the Irish to the coveted fifth star in 2021 cemented the club as premier Euro-rugby royalty.

So if we forget Leinster’s European drought, amid a waterfall of domestic success, we must equally forget that Toulouse’s aforementioned title in 2021 was its first in 13 years.

But both of those facts matter little in this battle of heritage where hyperbole thrives. It is a tie we can relinquish ourselves to, where we can let embellishment and exaggeration fly.

We’ll surrender to the allure of Dupont and allow our jaws to drop at the freakish and frenzied mammoths in Toulouse’s pack. Our applause will rain down on Leinster’s well-oiled machine, forward and backs interchanging roles with the upmost of skill. And with the amplification that this tie deserves, it could very well be one of the sport's greatest clashes.