What discord between hope and reality. A month ago we were dreaming of an All-Irish Champions Cup final; now we don't even have one in the Pro12. A Leinster/Munster clash at the Aviva in the Pro12 final was the fixture most of us were banking on, but the former's shock home defeat to Scarlets on Friday night means that Munster are Ireland's sole representative.
Credit to Scarlets for Friday's larceny: they were outstanding, capitalising on what was a curiously miserable Leinster performance, after which Leo Cullen glumly admitted that they "saved their worst for last".
Neil Francis is no mood for excusing the Leinster performance in his Sunday Independent column today, as he labels Leinster's defeat as "simply disgraceful".
The thrust of the column is that Leinster simply didn't work hard enough to win, but toward the end of his piece, he writes that the Leinster players have lost focus of late:
It also seems to me that Leinster have got caught up in their own celebrity - wives and girlfriends, girlfriends and wives, who is dating who, who is wearing what - when the most obvious question is who is winning what?
We're not entirely sure to whom he refers here as he didn't give any examples.
Francis has never been one to hold to temper criticism of Leinster. In his Sunday Tribune days, after a defeat to Castres in the 2008 Heineken Cup, Francis wrote that Leinster's performance was "disgraceful, gutless, leaderless, spineless performance and one which embellishes the reputation they have all over Europe". More infamous was the headline:
Leinster’s Lacklustre Ladyboys
After they went on to win the competition that season, Brian O'Driscoll admitted that the squad had not forgotten what had been written about them in "certain quarters of the media", and Francis filed a match report of the final under a vastly different headline:
Champions at last, ladyboys no more
Today's column offers another take on that infamous headline. Returning to his opinion that they simply didn't work hard enough to win, Francis ends the piece with two words:
Lazy boys.
Read the full piece in today's Sunday Independent, which you'll find in shops or pinned to the Leinster dressing room wall for the next twelve months.
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