AND SO THE time has arrived for the Nienaber Effect to come to bear. Leinster signed the two-time World Cup winner for precisely this reason: helping them over the line in the Champions Cup. Today’s final against Toulouse is the logical time for South African senior coach Jacques Nienaber’s influence to be most obvious.
Leinster have come up short on narrow margins in the last two finals, with their defence conceding three times in both defeats to La Rochelle, so Nienaber has been tasked with bridging the gap. It wasn’t helpful that Nienaber missed all of Leinster’s pre-season and a fair chunk of the actual season due to his commitments with the Springboks but he made an immediate impression upon arrival in November. Players and coaches liked the fact that Nienaber knew all their language and systems the first day he turned up.
And he immediately set about turning their defence inside out, or rather outside in given how he asks defenders on the edge of the defensive line to operate. Nienaber promised it would take 14 games for Leinster’s players to grasp it and he was right – the timeline concluded with the quarter-final win over La Rochelle when Leinster’s defence was brilliant. Nienaber said Leinster’s players would have to “rewire their brains” to get comfortable with his ultra-aggressive defence but second row James Ryan says it hasn’t been all that complicated.
“It hasn’t been tricky, it’s very simple in terms of the system; it’s just about .