Leinster secured a massive 45-8 win over Connacht yesterday at the Sportsgrounds, a result that does not bode well for the westerners' chances in their upcoming Champions Cup tie against the same side.
It feels like a lot of the discourse in professional rugby recently has been saturated with red card controversies, and this was the case with yesterday’s match.
After less than three minutes Connacht centre Tom Daly was red carded for a high shoulder to head tackle on Ciarán Frawley.
As much as Charlie Ewels’ red card against Ireland was clear and obvious, Daly’s challenge was perhaps even more so, as well as being slightly late.
Connacht head coach Andy Friend had no qualms over the referee’s decision either, after his side succumbed to a heavy defeat despite leading 8-7 after 50 minutes.
Here's Tom Daly's early red card
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Leinster head coach Leo Cullen spoke after the match and compared Connacht’s impressive fight while down a man to England’s Six Nations showing against Ireland.
It brings back memories to the Ireland-England game a couple of weeks ago. It sort of has that galvanising effect on a team and Connacht were so committed and you wondered were they going to run out of juice?
But we fed them so much life in the first-half by our inaccuracies, we were just missing lineouts, missing cleanouts and Connacht were by far the better team with 14 players after we went 7-0 in front.
Our guys at half-time were a little bit shell-shocked but they got more composed, signalled the right things and then we got a bit more structure and composure and accuracy in everything that we did in the second-half, so credit to the guys, I thought they turned it around well.
The bench came on and made a decent impact as well and we looked just a totally different team. I know there is a hill here at the Sportsground but it felt like a very steep hill based on the first and second-half performances! It was a far from perfect performance but there was a lot of learning in it for the group.
Leinster will travel again to Sportsgrounds on April 5th for the first leg of their Champions Cup tie with Connacht before the pair meet a week later in the Aviva.
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