Leinster and Leo Cullen to reflect on 'painful lessons' after trophyless season

Leo Cullen stressed that "complacency" wasn't the right word to describe Leinster's season-ending defeat to the Vodacom Bulls on Friday night, but it's likely his mind was wandering down that path.

The pattern is now clear across three seasons for Ireland's most successful province.

On their day, they are probably the best club side in Europe, as they showed by scything down Toulouse and Leicester Tigers with the most minimal of fuss.

But it's impossible to play at that level all the time, and when Leinster are off the mark, particularly on the big occasions, they've struggled to play a wild card.

You can go back as far as 2020 and the Champions Cup quarter-final defeat to Saracens, or the 2021 semi-final defeat to La Rochelle, as well as this year's losses in Europe and the URC.

When they win, they win in style, but when they lose it's often down to their inability to grind it out.

In the wake of Friday night's URC semi-final defeat to the Bulls at the RDS, which ended their run of four straight titles, it was put to Cullen that there are similarities to their big play-off defeats in recent seasons.

Is there something to that theory, or is the analysis lazy?

"No, it's not a wrong analysis because there are similarities in terms of how some of those teams set up the game," Cullen admitted.

"It’s one of the great debates really. There is that type of squeeze rugby. You saw it in the Lions against South Africa and that was two teams trying to play that pressure rugby game.

"That's not necessarily our DNA and there are lots of different factors.

"How the game is refereed plays a part in that and some of those big turnovers, particularly when the conditions deteriorate a bit as well, and how we manage that as a team, as a coaching