WHEN Leinster and Clermont Auvergne lock horns in today’s second Champions Cup semi-final, one man taking an especially keen interest will be Nathan Hines. As a former player with both clubs, the Scotland assistant coach has first-hand experience of the agony and ecstasy of European rugby’s premier competition, having won one final and lost another during an illustrious playing career.
It was in 2011 that he tasted victory with Leinster in one of the most memorable finals since the tournament was launched in 1995, as the Irish province came back from a 22-6 deficit at half time to beat Northampton 33-22. Two years later, his experience of the final was a stark contrast to that, as his Clermont side let a 15-6 lead slip, going down 16-15 to Toulon.
Some players might have been satisfied with simply getting back to another final with a different club, might even have looked on a runners-up medal as a neat companion piece to the winners medal they already had in their collection, but Hines was always far more driven than that. In fact, as he explained, having already won a final made losing feel even worse.
“It was really hard for me being so close to winning another one, having done that with Leinster and knowing how big an achievement that was,” he said. “Had I not won already I wouldn’t have known what it meant, so it was tough at Clermont to come that close again and not get there. But I learned a lot at both clubs and I was very fortunate.”
As he will be on the Scottish Rugby payroll until the end of next month, when he moves with head coach Vern Cotter to Montpellier, Hines should be able to take in the final at BT Murrayfield on May 13. He will obviously feel a lot of sympathy for whichever of his former clubs loses today’s encounter at the Stade Gerland in Lyon, but he insisted he did not mind which prevailed.
“I’ll be watching, but I have no preference who wins. It’s a tough one to call. I’ll be happy and disappointed whatever happens. Those were important clubs to me in my career.
“As in any job, you have you want to learn from every place you work, and I’ve learned a lot from every club, but especially those two. Leinster exposed me to guys who had a great way with each other, a team of players that knew what they expected of each other and trusted each other to do their job. They were at the end of that learning curve, whereas Clermont were in the middle of theirs.”
That trust which the Leinster players had in their own ability and that of their team-mates was the key to that memorable comeback in the final six years ago. Popular legend has it that Jonny Sexton’s half-time speech was the inspiration for the recovery, with the fly-half referring to Liverpool’s Champions League final win from 3-0 down a few years earlier. But, while acknowledging that Sexton played a vital role in Leinster’s victory, Hines explained that the rest of the team did not have to be persuaded by the playmaker that a win was still possible: they had never doubted it.
“I don’t think we were thinking, ‘We can do this’. We were thinking, ‘There’s no way we can’t do this. There’s nothing stopping us.’
“I was beat up and getting some treatment, but Sexto and I had spoken about it at half time and we just came together and said, ‘We can’t worry about the score, we can’t change the score, if we’re going to win this is how it’s going to be, we’re going to claw our way back’. The scrum wasn’t going very well, it was making errors for errors’ sake, and once we stopped that and had a bit more of a focus on what we needed to do it was fine.
“The thing about that team at the time was we had confidence in our own ability. We knew we were rubbish in the first half when Northampton pretty much threw everything at us, so we were just confident about where we were. We’d been in that situation before – we weren’t so far behind, but we’d been behind before and clawed it back.”
Compared to that triumph, Hines’ 2013 loss in the final felt like snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. “You don’t get those chances back,” he added. “This is a hard competition to win, and how you manage your team during all those games leading up to those last two or three weeks of the season is critical. That’s why when one gets away after you do all that hard work, it’s so disappointing, mentally deflating, that it’s hard to recover from.
“We were dominating the game and then we made a little bit of a strategic error. We should have kicked instead of played, turned the ball over and they scored and we couldn’t get back. It doesn’t take much at all. They’re hard lessons to learn.”
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