Groundhog Day as Bewildered Bulls are the URC Bridesmaids again

Bewildered and battered. This was a painful watch for any Bulls supporter. Not so for Leinster’s locals because their players were supreme in defending their URC title with a 36-7 win in Dublin.

A year ago Leinster hammered the Bulls 32-7 in the final at Croke Park in Dublin. They scored 19 points, including three tries, in the first 19 minutes. On Friday night, at Croke Park, they scored 22 points in the first 25 minutes.

It was Groundhog Day.

We had seen this movie before a year ago and it was even worse at the second viewing.

For all the fighting talk that last year’s final would not haunt the Bulls, they looked paralysed with fear and played with an inaccuracy of someone leaving the pub after an all-nighter.

Leinster were fantastic, but they were aided by a Bulls team that simply did not arrive for the United Rugby Championship’s Big Dance.

The Bulls have played in four of the five finals and lost all four.

There was hope, hype and conviction that Friday night would be THE night that the Bulls got over the line. But the only line they crossed with regularity was their own try line.

It was never a contest and even more one-sided than last season’s drubbing.

Leinster decoded the Bulls line out and left it a shambles. The scrum, the only facet where the Bulls looked comfortable, was never a factor because the final was lost within the first half an hour.

And the Jacques Nienaber-inspired Leinster defence emphatically and too easily shut down a team whose 93 tries were the most in the competition this season.

Nienaber, the Springboks World Cup-winning coach in 2023 and the assistant World Cup-winning coach in 2019, will feel a personal victory in how the Lions (quarter-final), Stormers (semi-final) and Bulls (final) could manage just one try in each of the matches.

There was no positive for the Bulls in Dublin and the big name players were absent. Individually, No 8 Cameron Hanekom was the exception, but there was little to cheer from his teammates.

All week I had trumpeted the old guard of Handre Pollard and Willie le Roux as being the key influence to a Bulls title win. I can’t recall a match in which the duo were as indifferent as in this final.

They made basic errors that cost points. Neither made the plays that made them World Cup winners.

The Bulls players and coaches had spoken of accuracy, intensity and discipline as being non-negotiable for any title win.

But within two minutes of the start Canan Moodie had been yellow-carded for a deliberate knock-on and the inevitable Leinster fast start happened.

Pollard dropped a pass, Leinster kicked the ball through and won the chase to the ball. Try-time.

Leinster played with intensity and ambition and showcased all the qualities of a champion team. The Bulls were the complete opposite in lacking ambition, intensity and presence.

There has been so much to enjoy from the Bulls and Johan Ackermann in the past three months. They had won 11 of their last 12 URC matches, had fought from 21-3 down at Murrayfield to beat Glasgow 22-21 in the semi-final, and were a transformed unit from the side so easily beaten in last year’s final.

The Bulls starting XV on Friday night included 12 of the XV who started a year ago, which makes the repeat of a year ago even more bewildering.