“The naysayers have been silenced for good,” read the lead of the Irish Times sports pages this morning after Leinster finally turned unrivalled potential into serious silverware by edging twice-champions Leicester to the Heineken Cup on Saturday.

After the humiliating semi-final defeat to Munster in 2006, the embarrassingly tame last-four exit to Perpignan three years earlier and only a couple of Celtic League titles either side, a beaming Brian O’Driscoll understandably said he’d been waiting ten years for such a day.

Leinster had been simply aching to prove their critics wrong for just as long. After a decade of underachievement, it had been thoroughly etched into the public consciousness that the province had no backbone, no heart, no bottle. They were individuals, never a team.

Essentially they weren’t Munster. In a very definite urban-rural divide, Leinster were the fancy city boys — all style and no substance while the southerners were the antitheses and had two Heineken Cups to prove it.

But out of the shadow of their powerhouse provincial rivals, Michael Cheika’s men “put all that culture crap to bed” with three stunning knockout stage performances and weren’t about to forget those who didn’t think they had it them.

“We haven’t forgotten the things that were said about us in December by certain quarters of the media,” O’Driscoll said, referring to the 18-15 group stage loss to Castres that put their championship hopes in doubt and brought the knives out sharper than before.

“I could list off a name, a number of names, but I’m not going to do so. You don’t forget that. We’ve gone and proved those people particularly wrong. There were some very distasteful things said.”

If Cheika had been inclined to pin up a newspaper article to motivate his troops on Saturday, he would have had a raft to choose from when the wheels seemed to be coming off once more at the end of last year.

“Leinster’s lacklustre ladyboys,” ran a headline in the Sunday Tribune after that Castres defeat when ex-Leinster and Ireland lock turned analyst Neil Francis said definitively that his former province were out of the competition.

“It was a disgraceful, gutless, leaderless, spineless performance and one which embellishes the reputation they have all over Europe,” Francis wrote, adding that none of the Leinster side would travel to South Africa as a Lion the following summer.

With some glee O’Driscoll, Luke Fitzgerald, Rob Kearney and Jamie Heaslip ducked out for an early night on Saturday ahead of their flight to Johannesburg the following morning, as Francis filed a vastly different headline: ”Champions at last, ladyboys no more.”

PHOTO: Leinster’s Brian O’Driscoll celebrates after defeating Leicester in the Heineken Cup rugby final at Murrayfield, May 23, 2009. REUTERS/Russell Cheyne