URC title would quieten the noise around Leinster after difficult season

Leo Cullen's side take on the Bulls at GAA HQ.

FINAL FLOURISH: Head Coach Leo Cullen. Pic: INPHO/Ben Brady

It’s little over a year since Leinster saved their season and softened the blow of more failure in the Champions Cup with a URC Grand Final defeat of the Bulls at Croke Park. Now here they are again. Same stage, same opponent and same stakes.

Leo Cullen tires of what he deems negative spin from the media but there is an undeniable sense of a club trying to keep the wolves from the door even as they go about doing what no other club has yet in going back-to-back in this competition.

Not just that. The province would be the first club to win this tournament twice should they get the better of Johan Ackermann’s team on Dublin’s northside on Friday night, but it’s not possible to frame this and not include the dangers in defeat.

The noise around Leinster since their thumping at the hands of Bordeaux-Begles in the Champions Cup decider last month has been inescapable, much of it fuelled by the words of Cullen himself and his senior coach Jacques Nienaber.

There is disquiet over the side’s failure to get over the line in any of its last five ‘European’ finals while the imminent loss of James Lowe on the back of other notable departures and few incomings only fuels fears that a window may be closing for this group of players.

If it’s true that Leinster are to play with a weakened hand next term then that makes this game all the more important to them, although it’s not like they are alone in Croke Park in having the weight of past failures on their shoulders.

This is the Bulls’ fourth URC decide in five years and all of the previous three were lost. The difference with them is that there is a sense of a journey just started, as opposed to one that may be close to running its course.

Pre-season had already begun when new head coach Johan Ackerman took over the reins from the departed Jake White and the team has found its stride with eight wins on the trot after an understandable bedding-in period earlier in the season.

Ackermann said as much on the eve of this one. He expounded on a journey that has only really started for a Bulls team evolving a more multi-discipline style under him while adhering to the physicality that is embedded in their DNA.

“I saw a team come together,” he said of their progress in recent months.

They face a Leinster side that is missing their best three looseheads in Andrew Porter, Paddy McCarthy and Jack Boyle and, while Ackerman says the scrum is just “one small part” of the game, you can bet your bottom dollar that the Bulls will target that area.

Another point of potential weakness is the defence of Leinster out-half Sam Prendergast who has been returned to the starting XV recently despite a potentially disastrous missed tackle for a late Toulon try in the semi-final of Europe.

Left out of the entire 23 for the game against Bordeaux in Bilbao, his presence in the No.10 jersey again now shows just how Leinster have failed to nail down the crucial playmaking position and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Harry Byrne before the hour mark again.

The Bulls will have Handré Pollard directing them around the park and it is unlikely he will have a stinker off the tee to match the one suffered away to Glasgow in the last four. As his captain Marcel Coetzee said, every golfer has a bad round.

Leinster’s discipline will be key.

Boil it all down and this is a game between a team stacked with Ireland players and an opponent buttressed by Boks, but Leinster look to have a more impactful bench that boasts players like Dan Sheehan, Thomas Clarkson, Jack Conan and Garry Ringrose.

Which isn’t to say it shouldn’t be close.

It’s impossible to see the Bulls fall as flat as they did last year when losing 32-7. They will be mindful of Leinster’s fast start that day and against the Stormers in the last four, and of their own semi when going 21-3 behind to Glasgow.

If the side from Pretoria can exert some dominance up front then they have a nine in Embrose Papier playing out of his skin, the uber-experienced Pollard and the class of Canan Moodie, Kurt-Lee Arendse and Willie le Roux further back.

It’s a hard one to call with rain expected at some point of the day and a crowd that will be doing well to breach the 40,000 mark despite the fact that this is two genuine heavyweights of the club game with proud, winning histories.

Whatever way the game unfolds, you just need to be able to move on to the next thing and not get too stuck inside your own head and not get stuck in looking too far into the future,” said Cullen.

“It's making sure our players are very present in the moment of the game and giving energy to lots of people around them.” Interesting thoughts given Leinster’s acceptance that they lacked energy in Bilbao.

It’s a hard one to call. Lose and the noise around D4 will only magnify. Win and it applies a balm to what has been a long and difficult season on and off the pitch, and restores hope that there may be more big days to come.

They might just get it done.