AUDIO: Jake and the 'irrelevant' Final facts

History will be made when Leinster and the Bulls go head-to-head at Dublin’s Croke Park in the United Rugby Championship Final on Saturday.

The winner will be the fourth different URC champion in the competition’s short and storied annals.

Bulls Director of Rugby Jake White dismissed the notion that the two teams’ spotty records in the play-offs will have any impact on the 2025 Grand Finale.

The Bulls will appear in their third Final in four years, having lost both previous appearances, while this is Leinster’s first URC Final, despite having topped the standings (ranked first) after the league stages every year.

The last five encounters between Saturday’s adversaries put the Bulls head at four-to-one, which includes two semi-finals – one each in Ireland and South Africa – as well as their most recent encounter in Pretoria, where the Bulls edged it 21-20 against a Leinster outfit without most of their Test stars.

The Bulls’ two victories over Leinster in the play-offs include knocking out in the Irish province in the 2022 semifinal at the RDS.

“It is different teams, different venues and different times of the year'” White told a media briefing in Dublin.

“People look into so many things,” he said, adding: “This team losses semis, this team loses finals. This team has some many Irish players.

“That is irrelevant.

“No coach ever talks about what happened 20 years ago and you lost in a play-off.

“This group of [Bulls] players have probably far exceeded expectations of anybody in the last four years.

“We’ve made three finals, and the average age of our team over the last four years has been the youngest of most teams in the competition.”

The Bulls boss pointed out that his team often faced teams laden with internationals – Leinster, Munster, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Those players are familiar with playing in front of big crowds and in big stadiums in pressure situations.

(LISTEN as Bulls Director of Rugby Jake White speaks about the play-off records of his team and rivals Leinster, ahead of their Final face-off at Croke Park…..)

“Those are things which define players who are good enough and not good enough,” White added.

“I’m not saying that we’re not aware that we’ve had three finals, but we are also very aware that we have exceeded what everyone has expected, and we have probably batted above our weight for a long time.

“Hopefully, this game will be the one where we will learn from the two other opportunities we had to win this competition.”

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