Bulls: 'We didn't really give ourselves a chance'

Head coach Johan Ackermann cut a rueful figure at Croke Park on Friday night after the Bulls were beaten 36-7 by Leinster in the United Rugby Championship Grand Final.

It was their fourth defeat in five finals and their second consecutive hammering at the hands of the defending champions.

The South Africans had arrived in Dublin with a Springbok-laden squad and a week’s worth of talk about starting fast. It never happened, as it was the home side who struck hard and fast.

“We didn’t really give ourselves a chance,” Ackermann said. “We were out of it quite early on the scoreboard.”

The tone was set inside two minutes. Centre Canan Moodie was yellow-carded for a deliberate knock-on, and rather than opting for the scrum that followed a Leinster knock-on moments later, the Bulls chose to play on. It proved a costly, in Ackermann’s mind at least.

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“For me, when you’ve got a yellow card and the opposition knocks the ball on, you take the scrum.

“There was only about a minute gone on the yellow card and I thought our chances of earning a penalty from the scrum were good. But we kept playing, made a mistake two phases later and they went and scored. That’s the lesson. Next time, take the scrum.”

From there, the avalanche began. A lost lineout led directly to a second Leinster score, and the Bulls found themselves chasing a game they had barely started.

“If they don’t score there and the next five or 10 minutes stay scoreless, it’s still 0-0 and not 7-0,” Ackermann reflected. “Then shortly afterwards we lost a lineout and they scored again. Suddenly it’s 12-0 and you’re chasing the game. Against a quality side like Leinster, those margins matter. We knew we had to be accurate, and unfortunately we weren’t.”

Ackermann was also honest about the lineout, which malfunctioned at key moments throughout.

“I think we probably could have looked a little differently at our lineout plays. Maybe they contested well and perhaps we needed a bit more variation on our seven-man lineouts. But I don’t think that’s the main issue.

“We just didn’t execute our plan. It’s difficult afterwards to say what we would have changed tactically. Some of the areas we wanted to play into were available, but before we could get there there was a fumble or the ruck wasn’t as quick as we wanted it to be. So, it’s not necessarily the tactics; it’s more the execution that we lacked tonight.”

He was generous in his praise of the opposition, who were clinical from the first whistle.

“Leinster were so accurate in that first half. Every opportunity they got, they got points. You have to give them credit.”

“But you have to credit Leinster because every mistake we made, they punished us. They were very clinical and were just a champion team today. They are a champion team with world-class coaches and world-class players.”

Despite the scale of the defeat, Ackermann was keen to defend the character of his players, even if the performance fell well short.

“The players showed a lot of fight and it wasn’t a lack of effort. We defended hard when Leinster attacked our line, but in those soft moments we were punished.”

“After they knocked on, we tried to play out of our own half, lost the ball and they went and scored. Then we got the yellow cards in between that and lost a few lineouts. We never really built a platform that gave us a chance.

“There are a lot of sore hearts in the change room at the moment and we wanted to be more competitive today, but when I reflect on the season, I’m very proud of what we achieved.”