Leicester badly needed some sang froid and a gentle bit of direction from their halves yesterday. Frank Murphy linked reasonably well but the intellectual stuff was left to Andy Goode. Take away the 'e' and he wasn't really.

I always got the impression, particularly in the first half, that Leicester were patiently cranking up the intensity levels and after a very strong second 20 minutes, where Leinster were looking over at the stadium clock to see when the first half would end, Leicester effectively owned and controlled the ball. But they just didn't have enough smarts to take advantage of all this possession and many times they were profligate when on the ball. This, more often than not, encouraged a very keen Leinster defence.

Make yourself all honey and the flies will devour you.

Even with the beefcakes Rabeni and Tuilagi . . . who wandered into midfield, took short ball and effectively presented themselves as foils as well as decoys . . .

Leicester never managed to gain any kind of advantage from their ascendancy. The problem was that Goode is effectively no threat and Leinster, for the most part, drifted professionally all day without leaking too much.

I would have thought that for Leicester's first match away from home, the very least thing on their minds would have been a bonus point. I was pretty sure that they had come here to win and I expected that they would revert to type.

The pack they chose could easily have spent the whole day in the trenches with Leinster. They never went for that. Nor did they ever really give you a firm indicator that they were confident to throw the ball wide. They ended up doing a very diluted form of something in between both of those courses. There are only two things that you get from playing middle-of-the-road rugby: white lines and dead possums.

Leinster won this game because defensively they were really on fire. Whether you think you can or think you can't you are normally right.

Leinster thought they could and it manifested itself in the way they defended.

Even when they made mistakes and gave easy possession to Leicester or allowed them a cheap line break, they were quick enough to get back and close up the ball carrier. And even in that awful moment in the last minute of the game when Geordan Murphy got clean through and surprisingly didn't have the pace to score after being hauled down brilliantly by Shane Horgan, Leinster realised that all their good work would be undone if they gave an easy bonus point to Leicester at this stage. They would effectively have been out of the competition even though they won today. That is how tight this group is: bonus point for Leicester and you had five dead rubbers to come.

It's very difficult to crystallise opinion of just how good this Leinster pack is.

It still has all its old failings and yesterday a lot of them showed themselves when the Leicester pack upped their intensity levels. But before even a ball was kicked in anger, Leinster were the beneficiaries of a small portion of luck. Stephen Keogh . . . who has been heretofore, and God knows why, a certainty in Leinster's back row . . . was ruled out due to a training accident during the week and Leinster, purely by accident, discovered their best blend in their back row. This won them the game. Shane Jennings had an astonishing 80 minutes and if you want to point at somebody who made the difference it was he. Every time a Leicester player threatened to line break, Leinster's number six either wrapped him or put him down like a dog. The amount of struggling tackles he made was astonishing and his only fault was that he was still playing too much like an openside.

Gleeson on the other flank was free then to do what he does best, trail O'Driscoll, D'Arcy and Contepomi and give them the option of support or the notion of a decoy to unsettle defences.

And it was noteworthy that at the heart of every period of Leinster's skilful interplay and passing out of the tackle was Gleeson. Some of Leinster's play out of the tackle threatened to submerge Leicester and it really caused them difficulty trying to contain the Irish province.

Maybe I'm being a little bit too critical but Leinster turned over a little bit too much ball for my liking. And maybe I'm being finicky in attaching blame to our six and seven. Ollie le Roux realises that he can use his 20 stone effectively and he put