They would have lunged at that after round two.

Ulster are improving but they remain a work-in-progress under Dan McFarland who hasn’t been in Belfast a wet week. It is impossible to see anything other than a Leinster win at the end of March but Leo Cullen is keeping his guard up against any talk of foregone conclusions.

There’s a few reasons for this.

Girvan Dempsey’s presence on the Bath coaching ticket was credited with making things awkward for Leinster at the Rec last month and Ulster will travel to Dublin at the end of March with a whole host of men for whom it will count as something akin to a homecoming.

McFarland’s squad is littered with Dublin accents. There were seven in the squad that faced Leicester on Saturday and they will bring with them a modicum of insider knowledge – most notably Jordi Murphy who moved north last summer – and no little extra motivation.

Add in the extra spice that comes with any derby and Cullen’s caution is understandable. The head coach played in two all-Irish affairs in Europe himself – against Munster in 2009 and Ulster three years later – and he has seen how that narrative can skew such weeks.

“You could see it over Christmas, those derby games take on a bit of a life of their own. I’m trying to think back, I remember Ulster winning their quarter-final against Munster away at Thomond (in 2012). They’ll get a lot of confidence from knowing they’ve done it in the past.

“I know it’s quite a while ago but there’s some of those faces still knocking around. They’ll know they can do it if they come with the right plan. For us, it’s about trying to prepare as well as we possibly can given the constraints that we have.”

By constraints he means the loss of so many of his best players for the next two months or so. Leinster have absorbed those losses many times before and thrived though and it is isn’t as if they have been operating at full strength of late.

The common denominator, regardless of the personnel, is an ability to get the job done and Wasps Director of Rugby Dai Young was suitably effusive about the quality, and the depth of that quality, in the ranks of the side that had their number yesterday.

“When you look at Leinster, they can afford to lose four or five (players). They played Toulouse the other day and they had a lot of guys missing but they still had 14 internationals. I think they had five British Lions out, but they still had 14 internationals on the field.

“That type of strength in depth is going to take some beating.”

Yesterday was a classic example of Leinster’s ability to mix and match. Ross Byrne was again deputising for Jonathan Sexton, Jamison Gibson-Park stood in once more for the injured Luke McGrath and Sean O’Brien was a late change in place of Jack Conan.

O’Brien and Robbie Henshaw were reintegrated on the back of recent injuries, Jack McGrath earned a recall and Hugh O’Sullivan followed in the footsteps left by Conor O’Brien last week in making the leap from academy lad to European debut.

All managed seamlessly.

Wasps, with nothing of note to play for, were never going to be the ones to bring them down. Leinster kicked off knowing that any stripe of victory would leave them ranked third among the pool winners and guarantee that home tie next time around and they had little trouble in confirming as much.

They played solid, unspectacular but efficient and well-executed rugby in the first-half and effectively had the game put to bed by the interval, by which stage they led 20-0. Wasps’s input up to that had been soporific.

The hosts took 21 minutes to launch their first attack and break into the Leinster 22. That was all too easily fended off and Garry Ringrose and Sean Cronin went over for tries in that period that were almost training-ground smooth.

Cronin added a second after the break – an identikit model of the one he claimed earlier off a lineout and maul – with Noel Reid chipping in with another. Amid all that Wasps woke up and applied some polish to their own half of the scoreboard.

Nathan Hughes, Dan Robson and Marcus Watson all touched down for tries in the last half-hour but it was an academic exercise that served little value other than to give the home supporters something to cheer on a cold and dreary day.

Leinster struggled away to Toulouse and Bath – and Munster - this season but this was the sort of procession that made any meaningful analysis worthless. The suspicion remains that they are yet to find top gear yet this season but Ulster will do well to make them reach for it.

WASPS:

R Miller; J Bassett, M Campagnaro, G Lovobalavu, E Daly; L Sopoaga, D Robson; Z Zhvania, T Cruse, J Cooper-Woolley; J Launchbury, W Rowlands; B Morris, N Carr, N Hughes.

Replacements:

C Matthews for Launchbury (HIA, 10); B Harris for Zhvania (56); W Stuart for Cooper-Woolley (58); A Johnson for Hughes (60); B Searle for Sopoaga and M Watson for Miller (both 65); C Hampson for Robson (71); J Gaskell for Rowlands (72).

LEINSTER:

J Larmour; A Byrne, G Ringrose, R Henshaw, D Kearney; R Byrne, J Gibson-Park; J McGrath, S Cronin, T Furlong; D Toner, J Ryan; R Ruddock, J van der Flier, S O’Brien.

Replacements:

C Healy for McGrath (45); A Porter for Furlong and S Fardy for Toner (both 54); M Deegan for O’Brien (56); R O’Loughlin for Henshaw (62); N Reid for R Byrne (HIA, 66); J Tracy for Cronin (66); H O’Sullivan for Gibson-Park (74).

Referee:

M Adamson (Scotland).