Lancaster's inspiring commitment to Leinster

Leinster’s one Champions Cup title in 2018 is not enough for assistant coach Stuart Lancaster, who recently signed a new deal with the Irish club in the hope of being part of their future success.

Lancaster arrived at Leinster in 2016 and his knowledge and experience has contributed significantly to the team owning the heavyweight status in Europe which it currently enjoys.

The 51 year old clearly exhibits a soft spot for Leinster as a man of his ability would be hot property in any club. When Frank Azema announced he would be leaving Clermont at the conclusion of the current season, the French giants were keen on luring Lancaster over as a replacement – a very prestigious job in the rugby world – but he signed a two-year extension with Leinster instead.

The job is not a perfect fit for Lancaster and takes a noteworthy toll on his family life. Based in Leeds, his wife and children would see him on a weekly basis before Covid-19. Now, he has been back twice before Christmas and only once since.

“That’s a long, long time not to be with your wife and kids,” he said.

However, he remains upbeat about his current situation:

“Someone said to me once, ‘The definition of a good environment is that good people want to come and people want to stay longer than they usually would and if they stay, they need to say ‘it’s the best time in my career’.

“I’ll probably stay longer than was in my mind when I first arrived because it’s so hard to leave.

“I can’t help but think about the team that Leinster can have in the future,” he says.

“You know, it’s not like I’m sat thinking, ‘We’ve got players coming to the end of their cycle’. You think about a Robbie Henshaw or a Garry Ringrose or Ciarán Frawley or a Harry Byrne or a Ross Byrne or a Luke McGrath or a Jamison Gibson-Park or Caelan Doris, James Ryan, these guys… they’re the young lads coming through, so there’s no reason why as a team we can’t be at the top end of Pro14 rugby and European rugby.

“The grass isn’t always greener on the other side, I guess, is the moral of the story.”

Lancaster has plenty of faith in the notion that Leinster can continue to improve in both the short and long term. Most recently, they put on a great display to despatch Munster in the Pro14 final and now look forward to tackling Toulon this weekend in the Champions Cup.

“I thought we got a lot of the approach work right but if you had been in the review this morning, you’d probably have thought we lost really, given the opportunities I showed them that we could have executed,” says Lancaster.

“I think there’s more in us, we can improve on that.”

With the Toulon challenge looming, he reminisced on the disappointment of last year’s quarter-final knock-out loss to Saracens and highlighted where they hope to improve.

“To lose in a quarter-final, particularly because we had gone so well in the pool stages again last year before Covid hit, it was really disappointing,” he said.

“We lost against Saracens because we didn’t win the set-piece battle, we didn’t win the forward confrontations well enough, we weren’t accurate enough in the first half, we gave them belief and a lead that was too hard to claw back in the end.

“It sits in the back of everyone’s minds and the previous year as well. It’s a big motivation but it’s not the motivation. The motivation is Toulon and that’s it. You can’t get distracted by what you did last week against Munster or what happened against Saracens.”