"It was the worst day of my sporting life. We lost the unloseable."
Those are Matt Williams' feelings about Leinster's 2003 Heineken Cup semi-final defeat to Perpignan, but he used it to illustrate how revenge can be a fantastic motivator for sports sides. Leinster face Scarlets tomorrow in the Champions Cup semi-final, and Matt believes that their previous defeat to the Welsh outfit will be a driving force for the boys in blue.
"I'm still bitter about things twenty years ago - I'm not saying that as a brag. When i say bitter, it still hurts," said Matt, in conversation with Adrian and Dave.
Matt also gave us a fascinating insight into the emotions and dynamics of victory and defeat.
"I was talking to Ronan O'Gara there during the Six Nations, and ROG was saying that for a few days you go into this cave, and you can't believe that you're coming out of it. You perceive it as failure.
"It was interesting after the Grand Slam, where we were all saying that the first emotion that everyone feels is relief. You don't feel great joy and absolute euphoria - that's usually the hours after and the day after when it sinks in. The first emotion is 'Thank god I don't feel that pain.'
"You look around at your opponents and you see that physical collapse. Their knees give way, they crouch down and grab their face - they do all the things that we do as animals to protect ourselves. It's just them saying that they've been emotionally really bashed up here, that they have invested so much of their lives and themselves in it.
"That's the joy and the disaster of sport."
Matt strongly believes that rugby failures are relatively insignificant in life's grand scheme, and that young people can and should learn to cope with sporting failure as a means of dealing with real tragedy in their lives. But maintaining this perspective was difficult for him at his lowest ebb in 2003.
"No, I certainly did not," said Matt when asked about whether he kept perspective after the Heineken Cup defeat.
"I hardly remember the next 48 hours. The next day, we were driving and I turned to my wife and said "Where are we going?" and she took me to the [Guinness] Hop Store.
"She did it on the spur of the moment, and I'm going through the Guinness Hop Store on the Sunday going 'What am I doing here?', but she was just trying to distract me."
On Leinster's culture and ability to motivate themselves, Matt had his own ideas.
"I think you tend to remember the pain of your defeats more than the joy of your victories in your career. Especially, I found that with Irish players they can use past failures as great motivations going forward.
"We are great lovers and haters! I have no doubt about the fractious nature of a bad defeat like that [the previous loss to Scarlets], I've been involved in them as well. That kind of thing is like the rupturing of a relationship and it takes time to heal.
"That's what a great culture does, it allows you to do that. Bad cultures - that fractious position you get into - doesn't heal. That's group dynamics."
"You don't get to positions of winning major competitions without having failure in the past. That's very rare - that is why teams don't win every year."
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