JOHANN VAN GRAAN’S familiarity with Leinster has bred far more respect than contempt.

While Van Graan remains a Munster fan — he and his sons roared them on during their URC final victory in 2023 on a family holiday in Miami, he recalls — there are equally several people in the eastern province’s current setup with whom he has worked directly.

Bath head coach Van Graan and Leinster equivalent Jacques Nienaber first crossed paths in 2004 when Van Graan was a technical advisor with the Bulls and Nienaber was running S&C with the Cheetahs, who would employ Rassie Erasmus as their head coach the following season.

Van Graan and Nienaber ran the same touchline as the sides faced each other in three Currie Cup deciders in a row between ’04 and ’06. The Bulls and the Cheetahs earned a victory each before sharing the cup by way of a 28-28 draw in that last final.

Six years later, they were colleagues, with Van Graan appointed South Africa’s forwards and attack coach after Nienaber had already begun steering the Springboks’ defence.

Their final job together as national-team colleagues was to see off Joe Schmidt’s touring Ireland side in 2016.

“Ireland won at Newlands, we won in Ellis Park and it went down to the final pass of the game in Port Elizabeth,” Van Graan recalls. “That was a tough series.

I remember having a beer together in the changing room, it was just before Jacques left for Ireland. And then when he came back from Ireland, I went the other way to Munster. We’ve kept in touch ever since.

“He’s definitely one of the best coaches I’ve come across in terms of passion for the game, always wanting to learn more, and his heart and soul. And you can see that in the Leinster defence: he has definitely gotten to the heart of that team.

“I can’t speak highly enough of Jacques. He’s a class coach.”

Van Graan speaks fondly, too, of his old adversary Leo Cullen and Leinster forwards coach Robin McBryde, whom he faced in past meetings between the Springboks and Wales.

But he makes a point of extolling the virtues of Leinster’s newest coaching recruit, a man who Van Graan believes can be their secret weapon even beyond his expertise in designing “excellent set-piece plays”.

“Maybe the quiet man of Leinster is Tyler Bleyendaal,” Van Graan says of his former Munster out-half. “Fantastic man. Fantastic coach. He went away to the Hurricanes and quite quietly became a very good coach.”

Van Graan notes Leinster’s transformation under the tutelage of Nienaber in particular, but his own Bath are a club unrecognisable from the pits of despair in which they found themselves when he took over in July 2022.

The 44-year-old effectively performed a root-and-branch review of the entire institution, demanding and receiving investment in a playing squad that has dragged Bath from the bottom of the barrel in the Premiership to title contention.

While they’ll likely require some form of result against Leinster at the Aviva Stadium this Saturday to advance in the Champions Cup, Van Graan’s side currently leads their domestic league by six points having won eight of their 10 games so far this season.

“Literally, we have changed everything except the walls of the buildings because in Bath most of the buildings are listed,” the South African laughs.

“The thing that was needed was clarity and direction. We worked on our fitness. We changed our whole game, starting with defence and kicking game, being pragmatic in season one. We added some players, made some changes in coaching staff — all for the right reasons. And we have become a team who are tough to beat and capable of playing in different ways.

“Ultimately, you want to be part of something bigger than yourself, so we’ve shaped it into something the people can be proud of. The Rec has come alive. The biggest thing, I think, is we have become a club who just hoped to one who now believes.”

It all feels distinct from Van Graan’s five-year spell with Munster which, while absolutely decent, rarely energised the province’s fanbase to the same degree as the South African has managed to do at Bath.

You might recall that in January 2022, Springbok legend Victor Matfield, a friend of Van Graan’s from their time shared at the Bulls, relayed to SuperSport that the coach felt hamstrung by Irish rugby’s centralised model in that he had been unable to piece together a tight five that would allow Munster to indulge in his preferred style of attacking rugby.

Van Graan certainly got unlucky with injuries suffered by his signings RG Snyman and Jason Jenkins in particular but Munster’s approach to big games, particularly against Leinster, often felt reductive.

It’s all in the rearview now anyway, but it’s worth noting that with free rein, Van Graan has assembled a Bath squad capable of playing a far more conventionally entertaining style of rugby while not compromising on any of that baseline grit. Illustrating their free-scoring nature is the fact that their points difference is at least 110 better than any of their Premiership rivals. But they’ve been competitive in literally every game both at home and in Europe this season, losing only one by more than a score: a 36-26 league defeat to Bristol back in October.

And Van Graan says he is evolving not just with his team but with his finger on the pulse of a sport that is subject to mood swings.

“As a coach, you’ve got to make sure you’ve grown,” he says. “I’d say the Munster team and the Bath team are two different teams with totally different backgrounds. I won’t comment on how we played at Munster. What I would say at Bath is it was a team who were last in the table and needed to re-establish what in my view are the principles of the game.

“You get players that adapt to where I think the game is going. The game, if you look at the law changes, is going to a more attacking game. Hence I made some coaching changes and personnel changes. What I would say, however, is if you look at rugby very simplistically, it’s 50% attack and 50% defence. We spend equal amount of time on both.

“In the Premiership, on the current bit — I’m not saying it from an arrogant point of view but I’m saying it because it’s a fact today — we’ve scored the most amount of tries and conceded the least. I’d like to think we’ve got good balance in our game.

“We’ve got a way we play here. It’s only two and a half years old. Who knows where we’ll be in five years’ time? Most importantly, you want to be part of something that people enjoy. The people of Bath are certainly enjoying this journey.”

It will take them across the Irish Sea tonight where Leinster will lie in wait this Saturday.

Van Graan notes with a puff of his cheeks that Leo Cullen’s side have 22 players in Ireland’s Six Nations squad. “It’s incredible, really,” he says.

“Leinster are a phenomenal team. What they’ve done in how they’ve built the club from the schools system to the Champions Cup.

They’ve no weaknesses. We’ve spoken about it during the week: you have two choices: speak about them the whole time because there is so much to say because they are so good, or focus on what we need to do and enjoy our journey. And we have chosen the latter.

“They have a very good scrum, a very good maul, fantastic set-piece plays. They get you in defence and they have some of the best players in the world. We respect that.

“But we average nearly 40 points and five tries a game. We have come up against blitz defence in the Premiership. We can play in many different ways and we need to get selection right.

“Why wouldn’t you want to test yourself against a team who have played in the last three finals of the competition?”

And however things shake out on Saturday, Van Graan says, he’ll share a beer with his old pal Jacques Nienaber afterwards.