Former Ireland head coach Eddie O'Sullivan believes Leo Cullen's combative post-match interview after Leinster's 29-25 European Champions Cup semi-final win over Toulon was the response of a coach who had just escaped a career-defining catastrophe by a single forward pass - and a coach who has spent years carrying frustration that he believes the wider rugby press has never properly acknowledged the scale of Leinster's achievement.
Speaking on the Independent.ie rugby podcast in the wake of the 38,555-strong Aviva Stadium win that booked Leinster a fourth Champions Cup final in five seasons - against Bordeaux in Bilbao on May 23 - O'Sullivan said Cullen's broadside at the media was completely out of character, but understandable to anyone who had sat in the head coach's chair under the same kind of pressure.
"I don't believe for one second that Leo planned to make those statements," O'Sullivan said. "I was very surprised, as everybody else was, about his post-match comments. Leo, as we know, is very understated whether they win or lose. It's a very mundane interview whether they win or lose, he's able to contain his emotions. And for some reason - and I'll give you my insight in a moment - he did go off piste, I thought, big time, particularly kind of having a run at the media - probably never the best thing to do."
The trigger, in O'Sullivan's reading, was the 78th-minute offload from Dan Sheehan that drifted forward into the path of Tui Silva. Had it stuck, Toulon would almost certainly have run away with a try - and Leinster's third capitulation in three years from a winning position would have detonated the entire post-match.
"Had that offload stuck in the 78th minute from Dan to Tui, it was over," O'Sullivan said. "That's a fact. Now, it was a bad offload. It went forward. But my point is, had that stuck, for some wild reason, Leinster are gone. They're dead. And then it's probably worse than the 22-23 La Rochelle, even last year to Northampton. It would have probably been an incredible disaster - and it came that close to one pass."
O'Sullivan said he had lived through the same sort of reprieve himself.
"There's moments your life flashes before you, and that was such a big moment for Leo. I think that shook him to his core, to think that they were cruising 18 points up, 10 minutes on the clock, and it came down to one bad decision or a bad offload that saved him. And I think he was in shock. So unlike him to go into that mode."
The second strand to Cullen's outburst, O'Sullivan suggested, was years of perceived under-credit for a programme that has now reached nine Champions Cup finals.
"There's no question in my mind, when that line break happened to [Drainey] and that offload stuck, he knew they were cooked. And I think he was shocked to his core. There was no euphoria on Saturday at the end for Leo. It was a sense of relief that we dodged a bullet here. And then the frustration that he's probably carried with him for a while that he doesn't feel Leinster have gotten their dues over the years."
"You know what?" O'Sullivan added. "There's a point to that too. I mean, like, here's a team that have been at the semi-final or the final of this tournament year in year out, year in year out - have just come up agonisingly short. They must be doing something right. And then you get all the negativity when it goes wrong... He's listened to that every year. It does grate on you."
O'Sullivan was less persuaded by the specifics of Cullen's choice of words - "you guys love throwing the boot into us" - which the host of Independent.ie's podcast suggested misjudges a Dublin-based press corps that, by and large, wants Leinster and the Ireland international core to do well.
"I think he did go over the top with reference to putting the boot in," O'Sullivan conceded. "I think he could have made his point without that sort of reference. But I think the emotion at the moment, the frustration - I give him a pass on it. I think the following morning he must have read it and said, 'You know what? I probably overcooked the pudding there.'"
Most striking of all was Cullen's revelation that his own son had left the Aviva at half-time because he could not handle the tension of watching the game. For O'Sullivan, that detail explained Cullen's emotional state more than any tactical regret.
"The stress on coaches' kids is extraordinary. I totally - I mean, my own children went through it. They know that their dad is going to get a pounding if it goes pear-shaped. The kids - it's completely out of their control... I'm not so all surprised when I read that. My heart went out to that child. You know, I mean the stress he had to go through... It's tough on kids, believe me. I don't think people think about that."
For O'Sullivan, Cullen's outburst was a one-night reaction to a one-pass reprieve. The bigger problem, he warned, is the scar tissue Leinster now carry into Bilbao against a Bordeaux side bidding for back-to-back Champions Cup titles.
"There is that sense now with Leinster that, look, we've lost some big ones at the back end when we've been in control and we've lost control. This one was like we're in cruise control and we lost it. That carries on now into the final. That's really hard to get around. So even if they're two scores up against Bordeaux and there's 50 minutes on the clock, the anxiety around that can often send a team into a shell."
According to O'Sullivan, Leinster were the better side for 70 minutes against Toulon, and the rugby they produced inside that window was "superb." The question Cullen now has three weeks to answer is whether his side can produce that same control - and, finally, hold onto it.
If they can, the post-match interview that lit up Irish rugby will look very different in hindsight. If they cannot, O'Sullivan suggested, the pressure that broke through Cullen's calm in the Aviva tunnel will not be going anywhere.
