but I would like to sail close to the wind with this one.

Leinster scored fewer points than Edinburgh last Sunday . . . it was quite an achievement. Profligate? Inconsistent?

Charitable? Sinful is the word. To be that superior and to leave without five points . . . extravagant wastefulness. The same sort of wastefulness that your granny warned you about. The starving children in Africa and you leave some sirloin surrounded by hills and hummocks of new potatoes drowned in butter untouched on the plate. Sweet Lord there is a couple of decades due from the trannies in blue.

Maybe there is a tinge of the sadomasochistic in this team. They like a little bit of pain along the way. They really have made it very hard for themselves to qualify. Dante and Milton wrote about hell without experiencing it. I've played a match in Agen . . . Beelzebub sticking hot pokers up your jacksie is the lesser of two evils. Leinster have won in France . . .

more than once . . . but this will be their toughest test. The away game they needed to win was in Edinburgh. Hell awaits.

Back to refereeing. Joel Jutge was in charge last Sunday . . . I like him as a referee, he is slightly eccentric, comes up with a few strange decisions but does the job without upsetting too many people and normally within the spirit of the game. He had a poor game in Edinburgh.

The penalty count was 17-6 against Leinster. I counted it 18-6 with a free kick awarded to both sides. That's a 3:1 against ratio. Somebody in the ERC should have asked questions. If the penalty count had been 20:1 it shouldn't have made a difference . . . Leinster were a vastly superior side. They did not turn up to do the job they were charged with . . . Jutge did not help.

In one of the English Sunday broadsheets they have an illustrated competition in the sports section called 'You're the Ref '. When you recover from the sleight, you are asked to arbitrate on a hypothetical situation which frequently has extraordinary parameters. The competition is run by Keith Hackett who was a full-time FA Tossef referee. I am strangely and inexorably drawn to this competition . . . I do read it though when no one else is around. Anorakitis . . . they don't even let you into the hospices when you have it.

I watched the Leinster v Edinburgh video during the week . . . it was hard to know who the referee was . . . there were quite a number of them in blue. In my opinion, of the 18 penalties awarded against Leinster I would have said eight were definite infringements . . . no question. Two, possibly three, were marginal and seven were of the 'bend over and touch your toes' variety. Of that seven, three of the 'offences' just weren't apparent to me at all, nor was the free kick. That said, of the eight real concessions, appalling lassitude and indiscipline were to blame. Only Keith Gleeson's concession for coming in from the side was excusable after Alasdair Strokosch had beaten Stephen Keogh's tackle with embarrassing ease, and Girvan Dempsey's for that matter. If Edinburgh had conjured a quick heel from the tackle zone they were in. Gleeson, though, had time and could have come in through the gate.

Most of the concessions related to the fight for the ball on the ground after the tackle.

Jutge allowed very little time when the ball-carrier hit the deck. If you didn't place it quickly you got pinged for holding. Conversely, Edinburgh got plenty of time on the deck and Leinster's D'Arcy and O'Driscoll were pinged for doing what they do best . . . the two stumpys are brillopad at nicking the ball in the tackle zone, and doing it legally too.

In 2004 at the Recreation Grounds when Leinster were guilty of grand larceny as they pipped Bath, Jutge pinged the west countrymen all day for holding as D'Arcy and O'Driscoll put them down, rolled them and pinched the pill while on their feet on an on-side position. Very hard to see what the Leinster midfield were doing differently from that match. If consistency be a sign of a good referee then Jutge should have let them get on with it. It's very hard to comprehend.

Jutge's performance was not the reason why Leinster lost. Leinster were lamentable in many respects . . . Edinburgh though were crying out to be stuffed.

Hugo Southwell . . . how can a team take itself seriously when its full-back sounds like an actor out of an afternoon soap opera. Hugo Southfork was actually made to look like someone who could play rugby by an appallingly inept display of tactical kicking by Felipe Contepomi. Every time the Argentine launched, it ended up in Bobby Ewing's bread basket.

The most damning aspect of Leinster's performance . . . nobody seems to have noticed it . . . was that they knocked the ball on 10 times in 84 minutes. How can a side that plays an expansive game knock onn the ball that many times and take itself seriously? I looked up the rule book yesterday. Apparently when you knock it on . . . you concede possession to the opposition by way of a thing called a scrum and you don't get it back for a while. Leinster have conceded the most yellow cards out of all the Celtic teams so far this season . . . if that trend contributes we might as well all go to Biarritz.

Brian Blaney was binned but I thought it was harsh. He was put off for coming in from the side . . . didn't look like it to me. I would have binned him for throwing away more possession at line-out time. I counted five turnovers at line-out time including the crooked-in which led directly to Rob Dewey's try. Edinburgh created nothing in 80 minutes and lived off Leinster's patronage for the entire game.

Blaney's technique is poor and, like a bad golf swing, breaks down under pressure.

Good throwers don't arch their backs and use their knees or ankles to put pace or power into a throw. He overstretches.

Modern rugby players are so strong that the only joints that actually move in the mechanics of a throw are the elbow joints.

If there are five or six moving parts to the throw . . . ankles, knees, back, shoulder, elbow and wrists and you also move off the line as you throw . . . that's too many moving parts and if you are tired and out of breath it doesn't help. It only has to be six inches out of kilter to be a bad throw.

Malcolm O'Kelly is one of the great lineout players. I can't understand how he would let this malaise to continue without putting his hand up and saying enough is enough and if he has been intrinsically involved in trying to resolve the line-out problems, why haven't they been cleared up at this stage.

O'Kelly's attempted pop out of a perfect fetch from Edinburgh's kick-off to Stephen Keogh just brought a chorus of groans to the proceedings. Eighty caps, out of jail, four minutes left. These guys won't score from their own half. I think I'll take it in and set up the slowest maul in history, walk our way 30 or 40 yards up-field and get Cillian Willis to box-kick it into their 22 and keep Edinburgh there until the clock runs down . . . it was painful.

To conclude, I see that Owen Finegan was cited for stamping in the game. I can't believe that Rob Dewey wasn't cited as well. When Dempsey scored his first try, Dewey had no chance of catching him, as Dempsey was two to three yards over the line Dewey deliberately stuck out his left leg and stamped on Dempsey's right leg as he was on the floor. It was a yellow card offence. The touch judge saw it, the referee saw it, and nobody did anything about it within officialdom. The players did, though. Horgan and D'Arcy both had a moment of nastiness with the Edinburgh centre 10 minutes after the break. It could have got worse. Not one of your best days, Joel.