Scott Penny says tap penalties have become a "new starter play" for teams after it yielded another two tries for Leinster in their win over Munster.
Having been on the receiving end of a slick tap-and-go move during last season's semi-final loss to the Vodacom Bulls, Leinster took note and have scored off some of their own variations in both Europe and the BKT United Rugby Championship.
Josh van der Flier crossed off a lovely switch play against Racing 92 while Penny scored a similar effort as Leinster crossed twice while down to 14 men for a comeback win at Thomond Park.
Dan Sheehan’s effort was less subtle but had the same end result, the hooker powering through the Munster defence to score their second try in five minutes.
"It's almost a new starter play," said Penny. "You've got your scrum, lineout and these tap-and-go penalties are getting really big now.
"I think a lot of teams try to copy what other teams do and see what's working. We have obviously taken a few of ours from other teams and made some slight tweaks, but we have been pretty effective with them over the last few weeks.
"Who made the call [for Penny’s try]? It was a team effort, we all kind of had an input into it."
Penny has scored three tries in as many games against Munster, and he also made 25 tackles in a player-of-the-match performance.
Leinster looked in trouble after 43 minutes when they conceded a penalty try and had Max Deegan sin-binned, but they produced an instant response to falling 14-6 behind as tries from Penny and Sheehan turned the game on its head.
"Garry [Ringrose] and Ross [Byrne] just brought us together, and I think the main thing was to keep our discipline, try and control the game as much as possible," said Penny.
"We knew we were without Deego for 10 minutes, so we tried to go to our maul options, tried to slow down the clock and obviously our maul was pretty effective in that 10-minute period.
"We got inside their 22 and we really capitalised on it."
Leinster head coach Leo Cullen made a number of changes for the trip to Limerick and his side will look to make it 13 wins on the bounce when Connacht visit the RDS on New Year's Day, live on RTÉ.
"I thought the players had really good composure when they were out there," said Cullen.
"A couple of nice tries. Scott Penny scores a great little try from that tap penalty, and Dan Sheehan shows a great bit of power as well to get over.
"I thought the effort the lads put in this week was good. A lot of work goes on behind the scenes trying to manage the group as well.
"We’ll have a fair few changes for the game next week as well. You park one game and you move on to the next one pretty quickly, so we’ll have a bit of fresh energy coming in for Connacht."
Watch live coverage of Leinster v Connacht on RTÉ2 and RTÉ Player on 1 January from 7pm.
