LONG READ Why ‘the curse of the Bambino’ is still stronger than ever at Leinster

Northampton Director of Rugby Phil Dowson had been watching a Netflix documentary called The Comeback, slowly teasing it into shape as a motivational tool for his charges ahead of their titanic Investec Champions Cup semi-final against Leinster in Dublin. As he revealed afterwards on Premier Sports:

“I actually themed it just after the international [Six Nations] window had finished.

“I themed ’Why not us?’ – the 2004 Boston Red Sox – after we got absolutely humped by Leicester.

“It didn’t go down too well over the first week, but as we got some continuity to our training and selection… our effort and intent began to light up, as you saw today.”

The Red Sox had already won five Major League Baseball championships when they traded star hitter ‘Babe’ Ruth to the New York Yankees in 1919. They didn’t win another for 86 years, during which time the Yankees hoisted the Commissioner’s Trophy on no fewer than 26 occasions. That reversal of fortune had a name. It was called ‘The Curse of the Great Bambino’.

Boston entered the 2004 play-offs as a wildcard team on a hope and prayer. When they fell behind by three games to nil in a seven-game series against their nemesis the Yankees, it looked like business as usual. They were trailing in the ninth and final inning of that potentially decisive fourth game too. Then this happened:

Designated hitter David ‘Big Papi’ Ortiz smote the home run that changed club history. The effect was biblical in proportion. The perennial east coast underachievers came back to win the fourth game on the back of that homer and swept the last three games to take the American League Championship Series 4-3. It was the first time in MLB history any club had overturned a 3-0 deficit, and the momentum carried the Red Sox all the way to their first title since 1918. The curse had finally been broken.

Throughout the finals against the St Louis Cardinals, they were selling blue tee-shirts inside Fenway Park Stadium for $25. The simple legend emblazoned on them was ‘Why not us?’ – echoing the phrase pitcher Curt Schilling had coined at every press conference during the comeback. He’d even grabbed the PA system on the team bus after game six – halfway to the impossible – and shouted, “I keep coming up to a question I can’t find an answer to…’Why Not Us’?”

Despite the price tag, the tee-shirts sold like hot cakes. Belief can do funny things to people, and in the 2025 Champions Cup Dowson picked up the torch and ran with it. The Saints have endured a difficult domestic season and now look unlikely to qualify for the Premiership play-offs. They are sitting nine points adrift of the last qualifying spot with only three regular season games remaining. It would be enough to kill the belief of a lesser club at a venue like Dublin.

If there is a curse, it is afflicting Northampton’s opponent on Saturday, Leinster. Always cruising through the URC and the pool stages of the Champions Cup, always fighting on two fronts for silverware at the pointy end of the season, always either developing or attracting the best coaches and players the world has to offer. But recently, always the bridesmaid, and never the bride.

Leinster have lost the last three Champions Cup finals by a grand total of only 13 points. On two occasions versus La Rochelle in 2022 and 2023, they have lost on the final play of the game with the ball on one of the goal-lines. And in all three seasons, the emotional fallout from the failure to add a fifth European star on the shirt has been nuclear – significant enough to create a blast radius where no living, meaningful effort can survive into the URC knockouts.

In the wake of Leinster’s 34-37 last-minute semi-final loss to Northampton, director of rugby Leo Cullen spoke as if still in throes of some nightmare internal monologue. Still trying to understand how it could all go so wrong. The word ‘horrific’ cropped up more than once.

“You set off at the start of the season and you know the final is in Cardiff,” Cullen said. “Everyone is imagining themselves, every team, I’m sure, is imagining themselves there in the final.

“When you lose it is pretty horrific, and that is the feeling we are experiencing at the moment, because I think it was one of those games. There’s definitely a strong feeling among our group that we haven’t done ourselves fully justice.

“What’s the reason for that? That’s the great mystery, isn’t it? A couple of things weren’t just quite accurate, we had a ton of opportunities but just didn’t quite deliver.

“But then you can get a little bit jittery. Saying all that, the last four or five minutes of the game, we’re camped on their tryline and we just don’t have the composure to get over the line.

“That’s the painful learning for us. There’s nothing we can do about it.”

If you cut him, Cullen would bleed true blue, there is no doubt of that. But at what point do the lessons stop? It has been a case of ‘rinse and repeat’ for the Dublin province for too long now, and the same patterns keep recurring at the critical moments. When push comes to shove, the curse is activated and players and coaches alike are helpless in its gravity.

When World Cup winner Jacques Nienaber replaced Stuart Lancaster as senior coach in November 2023, there was an expectation the new style of aggressive, Springbok-like defence would be enough to put Leinster over the top in the tight games: ‘if we cannot rely on anything else, we will be able to rely on our ability to stop other teams scoring against us’. That argument was supported by the first two rounds of play-off action against Harlequins and Glasgow, which Leinster won by a collective margin of 114 points to nil.

But as the South African defensive mastermind admitted prophetically last week, “People say ‘defence wins titles’, but you can’t win a title with defence. Attack wins games, not defence. However, defence can lose you games.”

Northampton’s semi-final victory was principally a product of their ability to unlock Nienaber’s blitz defence. The Saints scored five tries, four of which in the first half to set a benchmark for the game. They ran for 147 metres more than the hosts on 41 fewer carries, and made 11 more tackle busts. Their ratio of clean breaks to rucks set was superior – one break for every nine rucks set compared to Leinster’s one in 11. The home side dominated possession [21 minutes out of a total of 37 minutes ball-in-play] but they were not as efficient as the visitors at using it.

Doews that sound like a familiar storyline? It had been Ireland’s besetting problem in the Six Nations, and it filtered down to the top province in the country when it mattered. What was new was that Nienaber’s D could not save the day.

Dowson’s men came to Dublin with a crystal-clear attacking plan. Either they wanted to score quickly from kick or turnover returns where the blitz was not a factor, or they wanted to create a longer sequence where play became compressed between the two 15-metre lines, and the freedom to go both ways offset the blitz.

The Saints’ kick return policy was built on a vertical axis, emphasising short passes with the runner moving on to the pass from out to in.

If there are two areas which are currently keeping Fin Smith ahead of his namesake Marcus as the 10 in the England starting XV, they are his extra ability to [1] stay within the attacking system longer, and [2] see the potential running lines for himself and others earlier than the Quins magician.

In both cases, the out-to-in line keeps the first defender honest and forces him to plant his feet for the tackle; and in both cases, there is space outside that man for first Smith, then Henry Pollock to penetrate.

The most impressive achievement of all was Northampton’s capacity to deny the Leinster blitz any clear targets in phase play.

Short passes, vertical axis. As soon as Leinster look to develop momentum on the blitz, Saints zigzag from one side of the ruck to the other and the ball-carrier steps inside and keeps the pill safely in the middle of the field. That is Fin Smith sticking to the system on second phase and taking the ball into contact, where Marcus might have overplayed more speculatively towards the outside. Those little details matter.

It is a game of poker and Leinster are the first to blink when Sam Prendergast and Tommy O’Brien rotate in the backfield out to the right, hoping to rush off the overload in numbers when the visitors’ strength is over on the other side. Smith picks exactly the right moment to overcall for the ball from Pollock to exploit the advantage.

In the 62^nd minute Northampton fanned the flames, running five phases in midfield with seven changes of direction keeping the home defence off-balance – four to the left, three to the right – before the men from Franklin’s Gardens applied the killer touch on the one and only phase which took the ball outside either of the 15m lines.

Dowson may have unearthed a motivational gem to transform Saints’ ailing season, but the maxim will have a far more poignant edge for Cullen and Leinster’s players and supporters.

The cup has been dashed from Dublin lips at the very last on just too many occasions for comfort over the past three seasons. To adapt Cullen’s own words, it is still a big mystery why. The Leinstermen can cruise in third gear and beat some very good teams indeed, but when overdrive needs to be engaged, they have come up just short.

None of which will bother Dowson and his charges. They have decided who they are and where they belong: “100 percent of the time is easier than 98 percent of the time…Decide what you stand for. And then stand for it all the time.” [Clayton Christensen from How will you measure your Life?].