It is an achievement for the Bulls to be going into their fourth URC final in five seasons on Friday night but their failure to convert any of their previous appearances could spark what would be an undeserved narrative if they don’t break their duck by beating Leinster in Dublin.
They say results are everything regarding the highest level of sport but sometimes there’s a narrative driven by context that usurps the hard fact of the result. Fourie du Preez told me in a book interview in 2019 that he may well have played on after the 2015 World Cup had the narrative post-tournament focused more on what the Springbok team did to recover from the disastrous start against Japan rather than on that opening loss.
He has a point. The Boks didn’t lose another pool game after Brighton and ended up finishing third, with the eventual winners, New Zealand, scraping home in their semifinal against Du Preez’s team by just two points. The post-tournament narrative was a negative one driven by what happened against Japan but it could easily have been a more positive one focusing on the remarkable comeback from that opening defeat to go so deep in the competition and be denied by such a narrow margin.
