Holy cow! Leinster almost get a pat on the head in nerve-shredding finale

It was Bernard Jackman who probably summed up best the thrill of playing at Croke Park when the prospect might never have entered the heads of young fellas who grew up playing rugby.

Recalling that 2009 day when he lined out for Leinster against Munster in the Heineken Cup semi-final, he said there was no need for the referee to hammer on the dressingroom doors to get the players in the tunnel, as would usually be done. “We were,” he told RTÉ's viewers, “like cattle getting out of the shed for summer grass.”

Mind you, Jacqui Hurley informed us that a section of the 82,300 crowd were slow to leave their respective sheds, possibly of the watering hole kind, thus causing a 10-minute delay in the kick-off. You can insert your own gag here about rugger folk getting lost while trying to find Croke Park.

Jacqui had Fiona Coghlan, Jamie Heaslip and Donal Lenihan for company, and while they were all confident that Leinster would prevail on the day, there were warnings too not to underestimate a Northampton side led by Courtney Lawes and his mountain of experience. Although after seeing him demonstrate his hurling skills on the Croke Park turf the day before, Donal was tempted to “play him up front for Cork”.

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But Northampton’s youthful energy was another factor that Leinster had to be wary of. Donal, having ended up staying in the same hotel as the visitors, was struck by how toddler-ish so many of them looked. “Fin Smith? You’d feel like giving him a bag of sweets.”

But there was no need to fret at all, James Lowe helping himself to two tries before the game had even reached 15 minutes, with the magician that is Jamison Gibson-Park running the show. “Northampton look like rabbits in the headlights,” said Donal, with the advantage 15-3 at half-time.

The key thing now, said the panel, was for Leinster to finish Northampton off. “It’s about Leinster putting their foot on their throat,” said Fiona. “The lid is on the coffin now,” said Bernard, “we’ve got to hammer it in, make sure they’re dead and buried.”

And with the second half barely three minutes old, it was Northampton RIP, Lowe completing his hat-trick. By now the game was resembling Offaly’s visit to Croke Park the week before when they were obliterated by the other boys in blue, 20 points the margin of their defeat.

But. And we’re talking a huge one here. Northampton suddenly got a sniff of summer grass, loosened the lid on their coffin and two tries later the gap between the teams was down to three points. Resurrected. “Holy cow,” Donal didn’t say, but he was thinking it. “How have they found themselves in this position?” he asked Hugh Cahill, but he had no answer.

By now, all you could hope was that the Croke Park authorities would relax their rules and allow the Leinster fans have a stiff drink, because they were sorely in need of one, those last four or five minutes feeling akin to a stomach-churning aeon.

Relief only came with that Jack Conan turnover, for which he deserves the right to herd his cattle over O’Connell bridge any damn time he likes. Judging by the ashen-faced Leinster fans in the stands, they’ll only recover from that fright when the cows come home.

The panel was a bit pasty-faced too, at a loss to analyse what they had just witnessed, Jamie’s jaw resting on the Croke Park soil. “They won’t get away with that against Toulouse,” he said, at which point Harlequins would have said “hello?”

Caelan Doris looked a relieved man too when he spoke with Clare MacNamara. “We’ve had some tough days in Croke Park,” he said of his native Mayo, Jacqui admitting that she worried “the Mayo curse was going to follow him around”.

“It was a tight bloody game, wasn’t it,” Leo Cullen said to Clare, but the final whistle had barely sounded when he said his full focus was on next Saturday’s URC game against Ospreys. That man moves along swiftly. Although, you’d imagine the summer grass of Spurs’s stadium in three weeks’ time might enter his thoughts occasionally too.