Leinster's Ross Molony says the players will be disappointed with the number of penalties they conceded in their 38-19 defeat to the Cheetahs. 

Leo Cullen's side suffered their first loss of the Guinness Pro14 season on Friday night, in which they conceded four first-half penalties that led to scores for the South African side.

Their poor display was further compounded by the loss of captain Isa Nacewa to injury, while a sin-bin for James Tracy in the second half was subsequently followed by a Cheetahs try by Torsten van Jaarsveld.

Barry Daly kept the eastern province in touch with a hat-trick of tries, but it wasn't enough to bridge the gap.

Speaking after the game, Leinster second-row Ross Molony said that the players will be disappointed with the number of penalties they leaked throughout the game.

"Our discipline wasn’t good enough," he said. 

"One of the messages we got at half-time was to cut out the silly penalties we were giving away and to go out in the second half and for the Cheetahs to go up the sideline penalty after penalty and score a try - that’s down to the players and how we need to react to the messages that we’re given.

"At no point did we put the heads down, we stuck to our clear plan. We’re always thinking about the next play and it showed when we were fighting for the bonus point at the end.

"We have some serious poachers over the ball and they were targeted tonight. The Cheetahs ran some really good rugby at us. They were hitting hard and they were running hard, so I thought they played a really good game tonight."

"South Africa is a really tough place to come and play rugby and it showed tonight"

Leinster head coach Leo Cullen echoed Molony's sentiments, but said that his charges will have to park the result quickly and refocus for their meeting with Edinburgh next Friday at the RDS.

"We didn’t manage the ball particularly well. We were a little bit off and left ourselves with way too much to do," he said. 

"There’s plenty of things we can get better at from that game but we needed to turn the page quite quickly because again, we’ve a very disjointed week with guys coming back and Edinburgh will be gunning for a win no doubt and it’s going to be a very tough challenge next week."