Following Leinster’s 36-7 United Rugby Championship (URC) Grand Final victory over the Bulls, here are our five takeaways from the clash at Croke Park in Dublin.
A final settled by the half-hour
Leinster are champions of the United Rugby Championship for a second season running, the first side to go back-to-back in the competition’s history, and they did it with a performance of such cold control that the trophy was as good as won inside half an hour.
The 36-7 scoreline reads like a massacre, and in the opening moments that decided it, it pretty much was, as the Bulls did everything in their power to hand the game to Leinster. What buried them was not domination but their own generosity, and the ruthlessness of a Leinster outfit that took every gift and asked for more. Same venue as last June, same opponent, very nearly the same story, played out this time in front of a thin Friday-night crowd of around 40,000 in a stadium built for 82,000, the Bulls came to Croke Park for a fourth final and left with a fourth defeat.
The tone was set inside the opening exchanges. Tommy O’Brien went the length after Handre Pollard spilled possession in his own half, a score born of Jacques Nienaber’s blitz defence flying off the line and forcing the error. Rieko Ioane followed, then Jack Conan from the maul, and the Bulls, who had emptied the tank in that astonishing Murrayfield comeback a fortnight ago, looked for all the world like a team that had played its final the week before. To add insult to injury, yellow cards for Canan Moodie and Willie le Roux left the visitors with 14 on the pitch for half of that critical first half.
Sam Prendergast masterclass leads Leinster to thumping URC title success over disappointing Bulls
The battle at 10 was a mismatch
The contest was billed as a coronation of experience at fly-half.
Pollard, 81 Test caps and two World Cups, against Sam Prendergast, the 23-year-old whose selection ahead of Ciarán Frawley had half of Ireland arguing all week.
Yet it ran the opposite way to the script from the first whistle, with the young Irishman producing the match of his career thus far. Prendergast saved a certain Bulls try by falling on a loose ball with Stravino Jacobs bearing down, kicked four of his five conversions and a penalty, and finished a try of his own making after hanging a high ball into the Bulls 22 that not a single player in green and white, Le Roux included, bothered to chase.
He walked off with the Player of the Match award, the most pointed answer imaginable to a fortnight of questions. Pollard, by contrast, had an absolute nightmare by his lofty standards on the pitch, his evening summed up by a first-half penalty kicked clean over the dead-ball line. The young man with the doubts over his head played like the seasoned head, and the seasoned world champion head played like the doubt. By the time Harry Byrne came off the bench to score Leinster’s fifth, the gulf at fly-half had become its own running commentary on the night.
Gibson-Park gave Prendergast an armchair ride
If the ten channel was a mismatch, the nine channel was a masterclass. Jamison Gibson-Park dictated tempo, territory and tone, the conductor of everything good Leinster did, and he handed his fly-half the smoothest of evenings. His quick thinking made the Ioane try, a darting ball to the middle of the pitch that put Hugo Keenan through a hole nobody filled before a sublime pass sent the departing centre over.
Across from him, Embrose Papier, the URC’s own Player of the Season, was anonymous and poor. The Bulls had clearly come to play in the air, Papier peppering the Dublin sky with contestables, and the aerial battle finished 16-4 to Leinster. Keenan claimed everything that came down, the full-back also topping the match for running metres on 75, defenders beaten on eight, and clean breaks on three, a complete attacking display from the back. The Player of the Season kicked into a contest his side won four times in eighty minutes, and kept kicking long after the lesson was obvious. Twice Moodie did finally climb highest, and twice he tapped the ball straight into Leinster hands, first Max Deegan, then James Ryan. It was a complete abdication of one of the critical areas for the Bulls.
The choke at Croke
There is no kinder way to frame what the Bulls did to themselves. Three deliberate knock-ons brought three yellow cards, two of them Bulls in Moodie and Le Roux, and Leinster plundered the bulk of their points while Pretoria were short-handed. Referee Andrea Piardi was consistent to the letter, the night’s only officiating blemish coming from the TMO box, where the Bulls had two scores denied, the first a marginal call you would not want to lose a final on. The lineout fell apart, picked clean by Max Deegan, whose two steals and two turnovers were the chief reason the set-piece never functioned.
A clever, streetwise side froze on the one stage where all that Springbok nous was meant to count. 11 of their starting XV were capped Springboks, Le Roux a centurion, Pollard a double World Cup winner, and not a shred of that pedigree showed when the prize was biggest. Four finals without a win has stopped being misfortune and become a pattern.
There is a hard law out on the highveld; when the old bulls can no longer hold the herd, they are culled, and a herd led by Le Roux at 36 and Pollard carrying the miles of two World Cups was overrun by a younger, hungrier one in Leinster blue. Credit, though, where it is owed. Marcell Coetzee, 23 tackles and 11 carries, and Ruan Nortje, the game’s top tackler on 24, fronted up to the last, and the scrum was the one platform Pretoria genuinely won. A dominant scrum counts for little, mind, when the discipline, the lineout and the aerial game are all leaking at once.
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A farewell, and an answer for Cullen
For a clutch of Leinster men, this was goodbye. James Lowe signed off his 102nd and final appearance before Tokyo Sungoliath, the emotion of the night dented only by a yellow card of his own for a deliberate knock-on. Ioane marked his last act in blue with a farewell try before heading home to the Blues, while Luke McGrath leaves for Perpignan, Jerry Cahir for Connacht, and Frawley, also Connacht-bound, had already played his last. Caelan Doris, forced off on six minutes with a foot injury, will spend an anxious few days before Ireland’s summer tour, though Conan’s arrival and a fourth try in his fourth separate Grand Final softened the blow.
The lasting story, though, belongs to Leo Cullen. His side have not won the Champions Cup since 2018, and the wounds of the Bilbao humiliation against Bordeaux-Bègles were still raw. He answered in the only currency that silences a press box. Back-to-back URC titles, a record-flavoured night for a club that demands silverware, and a coach who walks into the summer with the job and the doubters both settled.
READ MORE: URC Grand Final: Leinster v Bulls result, scorers, match stats, line-ups