La Rochelle boss O'Gara: 'We've timed our run nicely'

Ronan O'Gara believes his La Rochelle side have hit their stride at the right time.

Beaten finalists in last season’s Top 14 and Heineken Champions Cup, La Rochelle have overcome a slow start in their domestic competition and sit in fourth place following last week’s win over Stade Francais.

After accounting for Glasgow, Bath, Bordeaux, Montpellier and Racing 92 in Europe they have worked their way back to the decider, where Leinster, who they beat in last year’s semi-final await.

"Mentally, we are a lot stronger," said O’Gara ahead of tomorrow afternoon’s clash at Stade Melodrome in Marseille (4.45pm).

"I think we’ve been working hard at a lot of things.

"You have to be very mentally strong to come back to this stage after what happened last year, even though I’m a huge fan of believing that you learn so much from getting to finals.

"I don’t subscribe to the fact that everything is a failure if you don’t get over the line. Yeah, we didn’t get over the line in Europe or in the Top 14.

"We learned from that and we’ve an opportunity to test ourselves in a really challenging environment against a classy team this weekend.

"I think we’ve probably timed our run nicely.

"If you look at what happened after losing two finals, we lost the first four or five games, yeah, the fixtures were brutal, dreadfully difficult but we’ve shown resistance, we’ve come back, we’ve made a plan, boys have dug in for each other, which was epitomised by the performance at the weekend [a 32-13 win over Stade].

"We just needed that result, it wasn’t about the performance but we got a performance and a result so I think good teams find a way to win and at the minute we are doing that."

The head coaches will name their starting teams at midday with O’Gara leaving