Humming Leinster attack a real positive for Jacques Nienaber
While a strong rearguard is viewed as a key ingredient for any successful team, Leinster senior coach Jacques Nienaber is of the belief that it is attack rather than defence that wins games at the highest level.
Over the course of the last two weekends, Leinster have kept clean sheets against Harlequins and Glasgow Warriors in the knockout rounds of the European Champions Cup.
Given he was the defence specialist for South Africa’s Rugby World Cup triumphs in 2019 and 2023, you might be forgiven for thinking Nienaber would be deeply satisfied with Leinster not conceding a single point across 160 minutes of competitive fare.
Yet the eastern province also amassed a combined total of 18 tries and 114 points in their emphatic victories over Harlequins and Glasgow, and this was ultimately the most pleasing aspect of the past fortnight for Nienaber.
“I’m more happy about the points scored than the points conceded. You can’t win games with not conceding, you must win games by scoring. People always make a comment, they say ‘defence wins titles’, but you can’t win a title on defence,” Nienaber remarked at a Leinster media briefing ahead of Saturday’s United Rugby Championship clash with Ulster in the Aviva Stadium.
“If you can’t score points, you’ll never win a game. You’ll only at best have a draw. So attack wins games, not defence. Defence can lose games. If you put a score on the scoreboard, your defence must be good enough to try and combat, and defend that score. Defence can’t win you games, it can lose you games.”
Considering how rare it is to stop an opposition from scoring in any game, there might have been a sense that there was a determination within the Leinster ranks to prevent Harlequins and Glasgow from opening their accounts as the final whistles approached in Croke Park and the Aviva Stadium respectively.
However, Nienaber stressed this wasn’t something he was consciously searching for from the Leinster players as his focus as a coach on match day is rarely on how a scoreboard looks.
“Somebody asked me just now. I swear, I don’t even know what the score is, to be honest. You’ll check it, but you kind of go from play-to-play thinking, from my view, what tactically they’re trying to do. What have they done in the past? You think like that. I don’t actually even know what the score is,” Nienaber added.
“In the World Cup final in 2019, I remember I was running the touch as a physio. Rassie said he wants to put on our last sub, so I said ‘hang on, what’s the score, isn’t it risky?’ I think he gave him nine minutes and they said ‘no, the score is like 25-12’ [I said] ‘okay, no it’s fine!’
“I literally don’t know. Some people are different, but I literally just think of what is happening next. I don’t know if players think about it, I don’t think so. I don’t think they know what the score is.”