- a cracking night's entertainment: a full house, two competitive sides and some end to end action. Great way to finish up before Christmas
- a win over Leinster - another monkey off our backs.
- scrum time. Lost us the game last week, won us the game this week. Scrum time is so critical at the minute. It's a penalty-generating machine. How many games have we won this season due to Afoa alone - 3 at least I'd reckon. Penalised harshly at the first scrum but Rory pointed out that the tighty was all over the place and from then on it was easy street.
- lineout. No Muller had me worried but the big men did well overall. I thought big McComb had a super game. I thought he should have slotted in with Tuohy last week, with Hendo at 6.
- Williams. I'm not a fan of Williams but tonight he was superb. As far as I could see he did not off-load all night but he didn't need to. He carried superbly, he controlled the back of the scrum and he worked at the breakdown. Stunning display from the big 8.
- Pack. The pack took the game to Leinster and fought all night. It would have been very easy to target the leinster backline and throw stupid passes wide all night but we took leinster head on up front. We fought at the breakdown and protected the ball reasonably well whilst in posession.
- Ruan stepped up to the goal-kicking duties when required.
- Trimble try with 14 men. Delightful.
Negatives
- Goal-kicking for the 3rd game in the bounce was not up to standard. Ruan stepped up to the mark but i thought Ruan should have been kicking last week.
- kicking game was verging on appalling. Ruan is usually on a sixpence with his box-kicks but tonight there were terrible. Unless it was a tactic to kick in-field but I very much doubt it. Gave the chasers no chance whatsoever.
- re-starts still not great. When kicking, we just chipped to the the 7 ft giant toner who was getting lifted to 10ft..... and we struggled a bit as usual when recieving.
- a few too many penalties at the breakdown. Needed to roll away a bit quicker which eventually led to a cheap yellow.
Overall, a really enjoyable game and an even more enjoyable result.
It's now time to get the Ravens on the bus to Limerick and rest a few limbs for Europe. We righted the wrongs of last week and have shown that we genuinely are contenders. Now it's time to start building for glasgow.
Merry Christmas folks....
