Leo Cullen admitted Leinster are facing a huge challenge to progress from Pool 5 of the European Champions Cup after a disastrous defeat to Wasps at the RDS on Sunday.
With a trip to Bath next week, and defending champions Toulon lying in wait, Leinster knew victory in the pool opener was crucial to their hopes of making the knockout stages, but Cullen's men were flat and toothless, as the visitors ran out deserving 33-6 winners.
“We need to turn the page very quickly now. We’ve Bath in six days’ time and it’s a huge challenge. It’s going to be a real ask to progress in this group but we just need to focus on what we can focus on and that’s playing against Bath," Cullen told RTÉ Sport.
“We started with reasonable intensity. I thought we gave away some pretty soft points which allowed Wasps to get into the game.
"The try that they scored was very, very cheap. We just didn’t deal with the ball in the air. That was 16 pretty cheap points in the first half.
"Then I thought we were unbelievably uncharacteristic after that, forcing things... mistakes from guys that have more experience than they showed today. We had certain fears in the lead-up to the game that we would potentially be a bit disjointed but we never would have feared it would be as bad as that."
Leinster’s third defeat in 15 European pool games came as a shock to Cullen, but the former Ireland lock insisted his team must now respond to the setback in Bath next week.
“The guys had trained well during the week so it’s disappointing. I thought they managed the game pretty well – they’ve some good experienced players out there and I thought they coped with what we threw at them pretty well. But we didn’t help ourselves.
"We need to dust ourselves down now and get back to training."
