Schmidt not thinking about the Final
Joe Schmidt admits he hasn’t given the Heineken Cup Final a thought just yet after his side booked their Twickenham ticket with a stunning semifinal success against Clermont Auvergne.
Leinster will face fellow Irish outfit Ulster in the May 19 showdown thanks to a 19-15 victory against inform Clermont in Bordeaux on Sunday.
A Cian Healy try, a Rob Kearney drop goal and 11 points from the boot of Jonathan Sexton saw Schmidt’s men keep their hopes of back-to-back Heineken Cup crowns very much alive in a truly sensational game at the Stade Chaban Delmas.
Leinster were left hanging on at the end of a pulsating encounter as Clermont laid siege to their line in the final few minutes, with Wesley Fofana appearing to have won it for the French before the TMO ruled he had knocked on in the process of scoring what surely would have been the match-winning try.
“I haven’t given the final a thought yet. I think it’s going to take us two or three days just to bounce back up from this as there are some pretty fatigued, bruised and beaten up lads,” said Schmidt.
“The final is three weeks away, we’ve got the Dragons in the league next week and we try and keep those two competitions separate.
“I was in behind all the players when Fofana went close and couldn’t see so I just presumed he’d got it down, and then he celebrated like he had. But it did look to me on the replay that he’d lost control of it.”
A number of Schmidt’s players spoke of their frustration at failing to perform to the best of their abilities despite a truly heroic result in their fourth Heineken Cup semi-final in as many years.
But Schmidt himself was quick to praise Clermont’s performance in stopping his side from getting into their stride.
“Part of the reason we were frustrated was because of the quality of the pressure they put on us,” added Schmidt.
“They made it pretty clear in the week that they weren’t going to let us have the ball to play with. They’d been reasonably outspoken about that and I thought they did a pretty good job of it.
“We were surviving on scraps a little bit and that’s always frustrating because we want to be able to set up the way we play and play to it.
“We talked about the scrum and the line-out at half time, making sure we got ball from those set phases because we just felt that, if we could get some good quality ball, we could put them under pressure like we had done in the first 15 or 20 minutes.”
