Clontarf travelled to the Aviva on Saturday with more than a party-wrecking agenda in mind. It doesn’t take long studying the season’s statistics to realise what a stunning year Lansdowne have had, so, for the visitors this was a perfect opportunity to test their excellent recent form against the Champions elect.
For neutrals in attendance there was spectacle galore with 7 tries, 2 disallowed tries, an almost perfect interception by a tight head prop and enough twisted knees and ankles to grace a jitterbug convention. At one stage there were so many corpses lying around it looked like pictures of the Somme.
Clontarf will have mixed emotions. From the positive perspective they will be happy that they managed to deal with the Lansdowne power game and put them to the pin of their collar for the full 80 minutes. From the negative they will know that had they been more accurate with their handling and crisper in defence in the first half, they had a real shot at winning this game. And it would not have been a steal.
In their 13, Mark Roche, Lansdowne had a real handful of a player who managed to break two tackles in the first half which led to two critical tries albeit with a little help from the referee who managed to miss a glaring forward pass leading to the second score.
At 14-3 down Clontarf needed to rally and did so with a superb maul for a try to Frank Cogan. This set the tone for the game with both attacks dominating in an end to end, you score we score contest. It reminded me of the end to the film Rocky 2 with both fighters dropping the sexy, dancy stuff and just slugging each other ferociously until one fell. Simon Crawford nicked a beauty under the posts and Collie O’Shea confirmed what a dangerous player he is with a score that kept ‘Tarf in it until the end.
That made it 27-25 and still Clontarf were coming again. The final try to the home side summed up the day with Clontarf breaking brilliantly from defence right on full time only to lose the ball in contact for a try to the Champions and a final score of 32-25.
So congratulations to Lansdowne, their captain Ross, and President Dermot McCarron on a special year.