Leinster and Cullen pass red card coaching challenge

Leinster overcame a huge challenge last weekend as they came from 19 points down to beat Ulster with only 14 players for three quarters of the match.

Losing a player is hugely difficult. It upsets many aspects of play and Leinster took nearly the whole second quarter of the game to come to terms with it.

Cian Healy showed true professionalism when receiving the red card - taking his medicine without complaint. There was no intent behind his high tackle on Tom Stewart. There was plenty of intent to stop the Ulster hooker breaking from the maul, which we see him doing so often, but Healy did try to lower his height, he just got the collision wrong and was rightly sent off.

Red cards challenge a coach's ability to think on the spot. There’s always a consequence in terms of attacking and defensive structures. However, when you lose a prop there’s the added decision as to who else you need to sacrifice because once the next scrum happens you will need to take a player off the reinstate a full front row.

You can’t play the game without a scrum, and therefore Andrew Porter came on and it was Jimmy O’Brien that was called ashore.

The carded player isn’t only responsible for their own early exit from the game in this instance. It’s not great from a coaching perspective to be forced to decide which player to lose either.

The decision to take Jimmy O’ Brien off surprised me considering his recent form but you only get a minute or two on the sideline to weigh up your options here and it’s important that you make the right one. The common replacements would be to take off a back row player or a back three player. There are pros and cons with both.

Defensive structures are the hardest piece of the jigsaw. If you take away a back three