Ronan O'Gara: We travel to Dublin with a fair Cork tailwind

So here’s what actually happened. We landed in Cork shortly before 11.30am on Monday after a marathon trek from Cape Town via Charles de Gaulle in Paris with an airport coffee to sustain us. It was 21 degrees and sunny leaving South Africa and Cork welcomed us with sleeting, wet rain. 

Is there another kind, says you?

The rain wasn’t the worst part. It was five degrees. And when the plane came to a stop we had a nice stretch of fresh air before getting to the terminal, side-stepping the puddles along the way. This is April, and I hear the lads back the plane wondering WTF is going on here. Where is this fella after bringing us?

Thereafter it was all upside. The decision to base La Rochelle in Cork in anticipation of a quarter-final with Leinster was hatched the moment we saw how the Champions Cup knockouts were panning out. Local knowledge and good friends fell in our favour. Most hotels or resorts taking a booking for 50 people won’t do so on the coin toss of winning or losing, but Fota’s GM John O’Flynn made the commitment. That was huge. La Rochelle’s CEO Pierre Venayre is brilliant at this stuff, but paying five figures up front for a trip that might never happen is down a road nobody wants to go.

Leaving La Rochelle last week, the players knew to pack their bags for the Stormers game, and that we would be continuing straight into Cork when we won. Not if we won. 

I’ve been in La Rochelle the guts of four years and we haven’t been in Cork until this week. Too long. Logically and logistically, it made no sense going back to La Rochelle from Cape Town. We got into Charles de Gaulle at 7am Monday. It’s six hours back to La Rochelle, and six hours back again to Paris to fly to Dublin on Thursday. We would have lost another training day. So we booked the charter to Cork, fell into bed for a few hours when we landed in Fota, a bit of massage and pool because playing the Stormers on a fast paddock in Cape Town and jumping into a metal tube for 27 hours would shock the system. Then we were good to go.

The great thing about pub talk and narratives is that the squad bubble is sound proof. We do our thing. Coming to Cork has been lovely but it gave us an extra day’s prep and for me over any other training base, familiarity. This was all necessary. The team needs repetition, because the machine isn’t functioning fully like I want it to.

That only happens when you put in time, effort, accuracy into your work. Players aren’t going to get better going to the spa and the golf course. What we can’t do Saturday in Dublin is beat ourselves, and that’s the beauty of this team – when we are right, we win, irrespective of who the opponent is.

And that’s quite a big thing to say when you are playing a team of Leinster’s ability. We are the only team that has won a European Cup game in South Africa, remember. The heart, belief and mentality is so good. But we need rugby to beat Leinster.

I WOULDN’T swap this group of players for Leinster’s or anyone else’s. No way. But after 40 minutes of the game against the Stormers, we had bigger problems than puddles on the runway in Cork.

The first half felt like we were trying to play rugby in a steam room or sauna. Our fellas were lifeless, sluggish, and looked like they didn’t know what they were hoping to achieve. It was like fellas had been hit by a stun gun, were discombobulated and couldn’t function. And you are watching that sail by you, watching the performance issues of thoroughbreds … Hastoy, Danty, Seuteni, Lleyds. And they looked stressed.

So it was a stressed dressing room at half time, 16-0 down. I was nearly disappointed for them that this was going to be their last whimper as back-to-back European champions. What a way to fall. 

We recovered enough to put ourselves six up and had a conversion to go eight up. The difference at this level in those two points is enormous. Enormous. These are two very different scenarios: you kick the conversion to go eight clear, it takes away a big stressor, and that is greatly under-appreciated when you are talking about the away team. You go eight up and even at a sub-conscious level, changes the mindset of the referee. It is such a difference and at 22-16 I knew we were going to be under the pump.

We managed to squeeze in a good review on Sunday morning in Cape Town at 10.30. The timing here is important. After Saturday there was a reminder from senior players with this sub-text: you f*ck up Saturday night on the town, you’ll be dropped off in Paris to get a train back to La Rochelle. No Cork. The review theme was straightforward: the opposition isn’t interesting, if you do things better. Stupid offloads, running laterally across the pitch, knocking on the ball, not tackling, not kick-chasing. 

On Saturday night, we secured a section of a restaurant upstairs to watch the Leinster and Leicester tie, a good game with interesting trends. We got a lot out of watching it through. The Tigers played well, but lacked accuracy in crucial moments. But it gave us a few ideas of where to go after Leinster.

The last couple of times we played Le Cullen’s side, it was all on the line. But there is no such thing as a quarter-final nowadays. This is final 3, as we call it. That makes it exciting. There may be a strange, momentary feeling for the winners when they realise after that there are two more games to play but I’d prefer it to the desolation of defeat.

What has been noteworthy is how the week has flown. We woke Tuesday struggling for a pitch to train on but Donal Lenihan greased the wheels in Con and the forwards reciprocated the courtesy shown by our hosts by doing prep work on the second pitch to mind Temple Hill.

Tuesday evening, the staff (all 19 of us) headed to Isaacs for chowder and chat, the players fanning out around town. We called to the wonderful Cork Arms and into Sin É on Coburg Street for a bit of trad music. The French boys loved that.

The kickers, Remi Tales and myself went to Musgrave Park on Wednesday. It was a blustery replica of Cape Town Stadium, minus the wind chill. If the forecast is correct for Saturday, it was good prep. We go to the Aviva and the players will feel the positive juices flooding back. La Rochelle has had good experiences there.

The team room was busy up to leaving Thursday afternoon, though Antoine Hastoy and myself lost the table tennis tournament final Wednesday night. The week’s low. John O’Flynn and the staff at Fota have been truly wonderful and remarkably supportive in the context of the game on Saturday. They’ve sent us on our way with a fair Cork tailwind.

We travel with a spirit that won’t be broken.