LEO CULLEN has insisted that Leinster do not deserve to be branded as failures if they are beaten tomorrow.
If the province do not overcome Bulls at Croke Park in the URC final it will mean a fourth season without winning silverware.
During that time, they have lost three finals and one semi-final in the Champions Cup and three semi-finals in the URC, twice when they had finished top of the standings in the regular season.
They topped the pile again this time around and Cullen does not believe his charges deserve to be automatically dismissed if they cannot get over the line again.
He said: “They’re all individual games. Every play-off game is a final as such. We have played in lots, whether they come in a quarter-final, semi-final or final.
“The group is learning all the time, young players come through, you are adding layers of experience.
“I think the way some of the questions are leading me, it’s like, ‘Whoever loses is a failure’. In this game there are two good teams going at it. If you lose in a final, are you classified as a failure?
“You can play your best game in the final. So both of these teams could play their best games of the season but unfortunately one of the teams has to lose.
“So one of the teams, who has just played their best game, they are classified as losers because they have lost but are they failures?
“You are guaranteed nothing. So you have to prepare the best you can with the time you have to put in your best performance.
“I hope the group goes out and does itself justice. It’s on the day.”
Many in the squad have never lifted a trophy with Leinster while even more have never done so in front of a crowd, with their last two PRO14 titles coming during the Covid-19 pandemic when restrictions were in place.
But Cullen does not want his players to get sidetracked by the prospect of doing so this weekend.
He added: “Unfortunately, the reality is once you get closer to something, that’s what people tend to look at and they can quite often trip themselves up.
“So making sure we focus on playing well, because that’s the bit we can control . . . the outcome and some of the other variables, we can’t control. Bulls will test us in lots of different ways.”
But the former lock did admit that Leinster’s recent tale of woe and anything else that is thrown into the mix could help in terms of adding a bit more intent to their game-plan.
He said: “Bulls, we played in the semi-final last year and lost, had to travel down to Pretoria and try to deal with some of those challenges.
“They look like they’ve got here OK, so, from our point of view, does it give us a slight advantage, an extra day? Then again, they’ve had that time together, a chance to build a bit of a siege mentality.
“Lads have trained well this week, put a good plan together, but now we’ve got to deliver it.
“We trained out there in very difficult conditions. If conditions are like that at the weekend, we need to make sure we are able to adapt.”
CAVALRY CHARGE
Leinster have been boosted by Garry Ringrose and Josh van der Flier both being declared fit and named in the starting XV. But Tadhg Furlong and Hugo Keenan miss out.
Ross Byrne is on the bench for what is his last game before he joins Gloucester but Cian Healy — who is retiring — is denied a farewell appearance after failing to make the 23.
Cullen said: “Cian, you think what he has done and achieved with the club, the contribution he made to Leinster rugby, that was probably the most difficult.”
LEINSTER: J O’Brien; T O’Brien, Ringrose, Barrett, Lowe; Prendergast, Gibson-Park; Porter, Sheehan, Clarkson; McCarthy, Ryan; Baird, van der Flier, Conan.
Reps: Kelleher, Boyle, Slimani, Snyman, Deegan, McGrath, Byrne, Osborne.
