Gavan Casey

RARE THAT YOU’D come away from watching a Munster Minor Football Championship final between Cork and Kerry thinking of Leinster Rugby, but hey, it’s Champions Cup final week.

After the Rebels’ provincial success over their neighbours, inimitably quotable Cork manager Keith Ricken cast his mind back to the start of the year when he posed the question to his panel, “Lads, if it’s unstoppable or unbeatable, which one do we want to pick?”

His players were surely puzzled before being convinced by their manager that the correct answer was ‘unstoppable’. As Ricken would explain months later from the dugout at Páirc Uí Rinn, his team chanting Campeones to his right-hand side, “Everyone can be beaten, but you can’t be stopped.”

Since their last visit to Bilbao in 2018, Leinster’s losses have come in various guises. Northampton in last season’s semi-final felt partly self-inflicted. Toulouse in the final a year earlier belongs more so to the shit-happens category in that it can be squared away as a marginal extra-time loss to another fabulous side. The La Rochelle saga was some kind of medley of each and more.

But across the last eight years, Leinster in Europe has become some sort of exquisite tragedy wherein the province’s diehard fans have begun to embrace their gluttony for punishment. A subscription to Murphy’s Law has, at least to some extent, lifted the weight of expectation. Supporters at the San Mamés Stadium or in pubs or living rooms around the province this Saturday afternoon will watch through jail bars for fingers, begging to be released from the custody of their own torment one way or the other.

Sport is great, isn’t it?

And yet they’re back again. There is a chance that this Saturday’s meeting with Bordeaux will one day become another intrusive memory that a Leinster player has to shout out of his own head as he walks the street, and yet he and his teammates have collectively decided to run it back anyway and risk perpetuating the feeling from which they have tried to escape for what feels like an age.

Leinster’s mental fortitude was justifiably questioned after occasions such as last season’s semi-final against Northampton, or after the 2023 decider against La Rochelle, but their sheer willingness to drag themselves back into the firing line year on year is admirable. They’ve been beaten, yes. But they refuse to stop.

Perhaps even as soon as this Saturday, there may well arrive a point when this Leinster side feels not burdened by the weight of recent history but, conversely, galvanised by the sheer pigheadedness with which they continue to stick to their mission in the face of routine heartbreak.

That they are underdogs to the tune of around seven points against Bordeaux will surely aid their cause, at least on some subconscious level.

To call a spade a spade, Leinster — including Cullen with his non-selection of Jordie Barrett — took their eye off the ball to some degree in last season’s semi-final against a Northampton team which had broadly struggled its way through an injury-laden season. Whereas Saints went on to prove themselves on the pitch, Bordeaux, unbeaten in the Champions Cup since two seasons ago, are an altogether more threatening prospect on paper.

And yet, for all of the brilliance they continue to ooze across the continent, the European champions have, by their own recent standards, struggled domestically this season. Yannick Bru’s Bordeaux have suffered 10 defeats in the Top 14 and last weekend a close-to-full selection went life and death with second-from-bottom Perpignan, at home, to keep UBB’s noses in front of seventh-placed Racing in the play-off race. Leinster, meanwhile, took an uncharacteristic six losses during a disjointed URC campaign, albeit they eventually sealed second place. As such, within the context of this season, Saturday’s Champions Cup decider in Bilbao feels like a question of what happens when a stoppable force meets a movable object.

Leinster and Bordeaux are each better sides than their league records suggest. Many of their 16 combined losses were suffered by heavily rotated squads. But others weren’t. Both sides boast a significant wealth of evidence as to where the other can be exploited, just as they were at home to Montpellier and away to Benetton in their respective leagues on 25 April.

To those who have seen them only in Europe, Bordeaux may well feel like the juggernauts that Leo Cullen described during a recent media session but Leinster’s internal planning will have long since revealed the European champions to be plainly mortal.

It will still come down to fine margins, and the degree to which Leinster can grab the chances that will undoubtedly present themselves throughout the game. Perhaps their sense of being the perceived outsiders will, on some subconscious level, stave off the element of performance anxiety that has hampered them during several of their near misses in recent years.

Perhaps Bordeaux will prove too strong in any case, as Toulouse did by a fraction a couple of years ago. Or perhaps they’ll find themselves spooked by the belligerence of men who have experienced so much European knockout misery that they’re simply no longer afraid of it.