FOR THOSE WHO follow Leinster and their ways closely, it’s easy to lose sight of the magnitude of their recent success.

Week in, week out, they talk about the next game being the only important one, and with the results they achieved last season, you begin to believe them.

So, when the Sky TV cameras show up and rightly start to talk about Leinster’s possible three-in-a-row and a crowning moment at the Aviva Stadium in May, it’s equally easy to be slightly taken aback.

At the top table, Shane Jennings nips such talk in the bud. His authoritative voice, refined in the dog-eat-dog Leicester Tigers dressing room says:

“Yeah, but genuinely – I’m not being rude or I’m not cutting you down – I’m  not thinking like that, nobody’s thinking like that. Because if you do, you’re going to fall up short.”

For good measure, he adds: “I certainly don’t feel like we’ve got any right to get through this group. We’re going to have to work very hard to get into the knock-out stages. There’s not many people thinking that way around here.”

Head coach Joe Schmidt, had been slightly more delicate in his approach to a similar question, recalling the passion injected by Montpelier in what everyone bar Schmidt would call Leinster’s first game as defending champions last year.

“The team understand that you’re only one of 24 contenders.” Says the Kiwi. “People talk about defending the cup, but you don’t really get to defend it.

“You get a summer where it’s yours for four weeks. Then you’re back into pre-season and it belongs to everybody equally until eight teams decide who’s going to fight it out at the end.”

That eight-club fight, the top 33% of Europe’s elite is where Schmidt has set his goal. But getting there will involve knocking out a contender for the crown in what the coach calls one of two “stinkers” of pool draws.

“If we were going to get to the play-off stage again and work our way through I think it would be a fantastic achievement.” Schmidt adds. “I’d love the be on the coat-tails of that, because I think the team would have to be incredibly effective to be able to do that. It’s a  massive challenge and I think that’s why you can’t look past an Exeter team that are in great form.”

Almost from the moment the final whistle blew to signal the win over Munster, Schmidt and his players have been talking up the strengths of Exeter. They’re battle-hardened, they’re a close-knit group, their work-rate is incredible. This is how our eastern province see Exeter and this is how they plan to beat them.

©INPHO/James Crombie

Yet, no matter how much they talk up the opposition and bemoan their injury count nobody, certainly not those in the dressing room, will forget: This is Leinster, three-time champions of Europe. And even Jennings will admit he knows how to go about winning a Heineken Cup pool of death.

“You obviously have to target your home games.” says the openside. “It’s very difficult on the road in Europe, we showed that last year going down to Montpelier.

“We’ve really tired to target this game, get a better performance than last week, build on a bit of stuff that we did well. And if we do that then we’ll be in contention.

“It’s a tough game. We’re under no illusions. It’s very important to start the competition well and try and get  as many points as you can on the table going into round two, because you don’t want to be chasing anything.”

Leinster, as much as they protest, are still the team to be caught.

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