The Vodacom Bulls will be up against it when they head to the Vodacom United Rugby Championship Grand Final against Leinster at Dublin’s iconic Croke Park on Saturday but even if they don’t get across the line as winners, it should not undermine what they have achieved this season.
That Leinster should start as clear favourites is hardly news given the way the playoff phase of the competition has gone this year. Unlike season’s past, every game has played out according to the rankings established in league play. The only game that was really close was the Hollywoodbets Sharks’ penalty-shootout win after extra time in their quarterfinal.
That game was effectively a draw, both after normal time and extra time, otherwise it has been the higher seedings that have prevailed. Which means that the team with home ground advantage has always won. And having played there a few times in the past, their most recent appearance being earlier this season, Leinster will have a much better knowledge of Croke Park, Ireland’s biggest sports stadium and most iconic sports arena, than the Bulls, who have never been there.
NOVELTY OF CROKE PARK MIGHT AMP LEINSTER’S SUPPORT
The novelty of going to Croke Park rather than the Aviva Stadium or Leinster’s normal home, which is RDS Arena, currently under renovation, should attract vast numbers if not a full house to the 82 000 capacity venue, which is the home to the GAA and the Gaelic Games. That will increase the magnitude of the challenge for a Bulls team that frankly looked a bit out on its feet towards the end of a much more tightly contested semifinal against the Sharks than the end margin of 10 points might indicate.
Of the two winners in the semifinal stage, it was definitely Leinster who made the biggest statement, dominating Glasgow Warriors from the early minutes at the Aviva and never looking challenged. The winning margin could easily have been a lot more than 18 points, and let’s not forget how good Glasgow were in exiting the DHL Stormers from the competition the week before.
If there was a happy group of South Africans watching the Dublin semifinal on television, it might well have been the players and coaches of the Cape team, for on the evidence of what we saw from Leinster, the Stormers might have been humiliated had they won their quarterfinal.
But the Bulls are in the main event because they ended second on the log, with this being the first time in the URC history that the final pits the top team against the second. It is also of course the first time Leinster are through to the decider in the URC era, having dominated the competition in its previous incarnations as the PRO12 and PRO14.
To be fair, they have continued to dominate the competition, winning the league phase in three of the four seasons. It is just their inability to convert that superiority in the regular season into silverware in the playoffs that has tripped Leinster up, which is where the Bulls might have a chance. If they can stay with Leinster, they have shown that they can be nervous when it is close, and it is not as if the Bulls have no history of beating Leinster. They’ve done it twice in semifinals, so they know what it requires.
LITMUS TEST SHOWED OFF BULLS’ MENTAL TOUGHNESS
Knowing what to expect, though, might just make Leinster more formidable. Remember that the Bulls were also the first team to inflict defeat on them this season, admittedly in an understrength league game at Loftus, but Leinster should remember that, along with those semi defeats home and away and the record thrashing they suffered at the hands of the Bulls when they fielded what was essentially an academy team against them in 2023.
But what the Bulls do have this time is mental toughness, an area where there has been enormous growth that really started when they won away against Munster and then Glasgow in successive weeks at a crucial stage of the league season.
Their ability to be composed under pressure was certainly writ large against the Sharks at Loftus, with the game being a quite freaky reversal of the two league games, which the Sharks won. In both the regular season games, the Sharks lost players to cards and should have been put away but the Bulls failed to do so.
That was when some started to peddle the theory that they might be temperamentally weak, with their loss to the Sharks on try count in a Carling Currie Cup semifinal that went to extra time also factored in. The Bulls were arguably stronger than the Sharks in all three of those games but could not convert their periods of dominance into a win.
FREAKY REVERSAL OF LEAGUE GAMES
In this most recent game, that was reversed. This time it was the Bulls who lost players to cards, three of them, and there were times when they were down to 13 men (there was a stage of the Loftus league game where the Sharks were actually down to 12). Even when the Bulls didn’t have players in the bin the Sharks had shown signs of superiority, and the irony of this game was that it was probably the Sharks’ best performance in several months.
Had it not been for a marginal call against the Sharks when Ethan Hooker went over in the early minutes, it might have been a very different game to how it turned out. A 7-0 lead then might have galvanised the Sharks and they were unlucky.
However, where they were not unlucky was in their failure to punish the Bulls for their indiscipline. In the third quarter, it looked like the Sharks were gaining momentum and might take control, particularly once they got to a two-point deficit. But they didn’t convert, and the Bulls showed great composure and furious defensive commitment in keeping the Sharks out.
It was a direct contrast to what had happened between these teams previously in the season, with this time it being the Sharks who made mistakes when they lacked composure chasing the game. It was a deserved win for the Bulls and if nothing else they will look back on a season where they made further progress on the upward trajectory on the performance graph that started its current trend in the wash-up to the defeat to the Stormers in the 2023 quarterfinal.
That was just two years ago. It seems like a lot longer. For both teams.
VODACOM URC RESULTS
Leinster 37 Glasgow Warriors 19
Vodacom Bulls 25 Hollywoodbets Sharks 15
Vodacom URC Grand Final
Leinster v Vodacom Bulls (Croke Park, Dublin, Saturday