IT IS AN area of their game that has come under scrutiny in recent weeks and assistant coach Robin McBryde is looking for consistency from the Leinster lineout moving into the second half of the season.

They ultimately emerged from the game with a 15-7 victory, yet Leinster won just nine of their 16 lineouts in a European Champions Cup Pool 2 clash against Clermont at the Aviva Stadium on 14 December. Connacht also caused problems for the eastern province in this department during their URC encounter in the same venue last Saturday.

It is expected their pack will continue to be challenged heading into 2025 with a new law that comes into effect from 1 January determining that lineouts must be formed within 30 seconds of a mark being made.

The province’s senior coach Jacques Nienaber suggested last week that an attempt to prepare themselves for this law change may have contributed to the issues they experienced in the Clermont game and McBryde – who oversees the Leinster lineout – acknowledged he has possibly been trying to force things during recent games.

“For me personally, obviously we’ve had a couple of poor lineout performances recently. That’s down to the opposition, with what they’ve done. I thought Josh Murphy did well for Connacht at the weekend. When he was here, I enjoyed working with Josh. He’s a great lad,” McBryde said at a Leinster media briefing earlier this week.

“Consistency would be the one thing I am looking for. Maybe I am trying to stretch the boys a bit too far, but the boys are great to work with. They need to be stretched, we need to make a few subtle changes here and there. Whether this is the right time to do it, I don’t know. That’s on me.

“I thought Clermont arrived with a good plan. The important thing is when you make a mistake or lose a lineout, you learn from it quickly and we didn’t do that against Clermont. We kept going to the same area. It was a positive against Connacht because we didn’t lose a lineout in the second half. Are we trying to force it a little bit? There are a lot of things in there.”

Yet despite having this scope for improvement in a major facet of the game, Leinster currently hold a six-point lead over defending champions Glasgow Warriors at the summit of the United Rugby Championship table and are marginally behind Ronan O’Gara’s La Rochelle on score difference in the Champions Cup Pool 2 standings.

The Connacht game represented their 10th win from as many fixtures in the current season and it was achieved without a whole host of big-name players who will feature against arch rivals Munster in their latest interprovincial URC bout at Thomond Park this evening. Their resources were also stretched over the course of last Saturday’s contest on Lansdowne Road and McBryde was encouraged by how Leinster managed to overcome these issues – and eventually come on the right side of the result.

“You look at the bump in the road we had against Connacht. We lost Jack Conan pretty early, Max Deegan [Conan’s replacement] went off early. All of a sudden you have Alex Soroka playing his first game since I don’t know when and he’s got to scrummage at 8. Then we’ve got somebody [Lee Barron] in the bin and you’ve got Scott Penny throwing in the lineout.

“You’ve got all those things and you come out the other side and you think ‘we must be doing something right’. That cohesion, even with the chopping and the changing that’s been going on in the festive period, we still came through it. That, to me, speaks volumes.”

Whereas Leinster held off a second half surge from Connacht to earn a 20-12 win in the Aviva last Saturday, Munster moved into the URC play-off spots by defeating Ulster in Ravenhill on the previous night.

The hosts had looked set to triumph in the latter game despite losing Ireland international Tom O’Toole to a red card in the opening period, but Tom Farrell had other ideas as he completed his hat-trick of tries in the dying moments to earn Munster a 22-19 victory.

Even though it was a game that struggled to catch fire for large spells, McBryde’s past experiences in both Ireland and his native Wales tells him that this is quite often the case for derby encounters. It would come as little surprise if tonight’s showdown in Limerick also turned into an arm wrestle and McBryde certainly isn’t expecting anything easy in a packed out Thomond Park.

“Local derbies, in my experience anyway, not a lot of rugby does get played because there’s a little bit more blood and guts about a local derby. The physical nature of it and the will and the want to get one over your closest rival. Sometimes that can cloud your mind a little bit, but it was good. There will be 27,000 there on Friday, so that will be a great atmosphere to go into,” McBryde added.

Daire Walsh