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Leinster 25-6 Munster: Munster mashed
http://sport.scotsman.com/rugby/Lein...hed.5230397.jp
By Tom English at Croke Park
A WORLD record crowd for a match between two clubs, a towering 82,208, saw a Heineken Cup semi-final that will take its place in history. The champions were chewed up and spat out.
They're gone from a tournament that everybody felt certain they would win, dumped by a team that finally cracked the puzzle of how to play them at their own game. The winners were murderously explosive and ruthless when the try chances came their wa
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y. Leinster are the new Munster. Blue is the new red.
Defeat was hard enough to take for the Munster players but there could be trouble coming down the line for one of them. Alan Quinlan, a Lion in waiting, is in for a few sleepless nights after he appeared to gouge the Leinster captain Leo Cullen midway through the second half. Television replays look bad for the flanker. The kind of tariff normally put on the guilty in these cases is d 18 weeks. Quinlan will be a worried man.
Leinster's day, though. And how. It was a collision that saw the long-lost beast return to Leinster's play after, ooh, several generations in hibernation. What we saw was extraordinary. Leinster made mistakes and suffered horrendous bad luck; they lost four line-outs in the first half alone and didn't blink; they lost their loosehead prop, Cian Healy, to the bin in the 17th minute and yet they finished that 10 minute spell 3-3. They saw playmaker Felipe Contepomi go off with a nasty knee injury in the 25th minute but responded by hitting Munster with eight unanswered points and they lost their Lion Luke Fitzgerald after 59 minutes and dealt with the setback by running in their third try two minutes later.
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The huge numbers of Munster fans grew quiet now. And were reduced to silence soon after. On the hour, belief among the Leinster faithful made way for certainty when O'Driscoll picked off O'Gara's pass and sprinted clear. How fitting that on this seismic day, the centre sealed the win. He'll be going to South Africa in the best of health. Quinlan's fate, though, is far more clouded.
Munster: Warwick, Howlett, Earls, Mafi, Dowling, O'Gara, Stringer, Horan, Flannery, Hayes, O'Callaghan, O'Connell, Quinlan, Wallace, Leamy. Subs: Murphy for Warwick (66), D. Hurley for Earls (78), Prendergast for Stringer (74), Fogarty for Flannery (71), Buckley for Hayes (68), O'Driscoll for O'Callaghan (74), Ronan for Leamy (66).
Leinster: Nacewa, Horgan, O'Driscoll, D'Arcy, Fitzgerald, Contepomi, Whitaker, Healy, Jackman, Wright, Cullen, O'Kelly, Elsom, Jennings, Heaslip. Replacements: Dempsey for Fitzgerald (59), Sexton for Contepomi (25), Fogarty for Jackman (62), O'Brien for Jennings (74).
Scorers: Munster – Pens: O'Gara. Drop Goals: O'Gara. Leinster – Tries: D'Arcy, Fitzgerald, O'Driscoll. Cons: Sexton 2. Pens: Sexton. Drop Goals: Contepomi.
Referee: Nigel Owens (Wales). Attendance: 82,208