WHILE HE ADMITTED their level of performance didn’t reach the standard they have set for themselves, Jacques Nienaber has insisted Leinster were ultimately satisfied with their 15-7 win over Clermont at the Aviva Stadium last Saturday.

Thanks to opening half tries from Garry Ringrose and Jordie Barrett, the eastern province brought a five-point cushion into the interval of their European Champions Cup Pool Two clash with the Top 14 outfit in Irish Rugby HQ.

Yet a 48th-minute penalty from Sam Prendergast was the only score the hosts mustered after the restart as they fell short of matching their bonus point victory away to Bristol on the previous weekend.

Despite the above, Leinster senior coach Nienaber was in a generally positive frame of mind as he reflected on the triumph against Clermont at a media briefing in UCD yesterday.

“You must always cherish victories because there will come a time when you don’t get them. Then you kind of wish that you celebrated them more when you did get them. If you look at Man City and where they are now, things can change in a heartbeat, so you must always cherish victories because they are not a given in pro sport,” Nienaber said.

“Putting that aside, the disappointment is not that we won, the disappointment is if we look at our performance measured against the standard that we set ourselves, I don’t think that was on par and that’s why we’re disappointed in our performance. But we’re very happy with the win and you have to celebrate the win.”

Nevertheless, it was a far from vintage display by Leinster on the day and the province’s head coach Leo Cullen remarked in the press conference that followed their showdown with Clermont that ‘we need to look at ourselves as coaches and go away and be very self-reflecting in terms of messaging and all the rest’.

Although he stressed that he didn’t want to say what Cullen thinks, Nienaber acknowledged there is always more that coaches can do to get the very best out of the players at their disposal.

“I think as a leadership, when you don’t get a performance like that, you must always start with yourself. That’s how my brain works. Knowing these coaches, I think the majority of us will always go ‘You must look at the leadership first and say, listen, where did we go wrong? What did we do, or didn’t do, during the week that we could have done better?’ and then you build on to that.

“I think it’s easy just to go ‘listen, this is what was wrong on the pitch.’ I think the 80 minutes you see on Saturday is but a small chunk of the preparation and the work that goes into getting a performance. You have to look at the whole build-up and see where we could have done better.”

One of the biggest criticisms of Leinster’s performance against Clermont revolved around their line-out. Over the course of the action, the Blues managed to win just nine of the 16 throws that were delivered by either Ronan Kelleher or Gus McCarthy.

This is a stat that was seen as particularly alarming for a team that are seeking to challenge strongly for silverware at the business end of the current season, but Nienaber offered a detailed explanation for why there might have been issues with their line-out in the Aviva last Saturday.

From the beginning of next month, a number of law changes are to come into effect with a view to speeding up the game of rugby. One of them is that a line-out must be formed within 30 seconds and this is something Leinster have already been trying to implement in recent weeks.

“From the 1st of January, it will be part of our game. It is something that we have been working on the training pitch. We tried new creative things and that is what we did this weekend. It’s not necessarily just the speed, but we felt we had to bring in some creativity within our line-out,” Nienaber added.

“That was the talk before the game ‘listen, we are going to try new stuff’. Maybe if you go in hindsight ‘should you do it in Europe?’, but the nice thing in Europe, we know Clermont is a quality opposition and they’ve got a very good line-out defence.

“You can maybe park the evolution in your line-out and do it against a team that’s maybe not as good a line-out contesting team. But the question then is always, ‘Will they ask enough questions of you?’

“I think if you go back and you look at our URC line-out completion, I think it’s close to 90% if not 90%. If you look at the Bristol game, where we weren’t too creative and didn’t want to try new things, because it was the start of Europe. Our line-out success rate, I think we lost one line-out in the Bristol game.

“Obviously it’s a little bit of both. It comes down to the piece we just spoke about. Now, how do you stay at the top? You have to be creative. You have to evolve. You have to try new things. Sometimes it comes at a risk, like it did this weekend. Thankfully for us, we still got the win, but we are still disappointed in our performance.”