Ivan van Rooyen’s Lions roared into their first-ever URC quarter-final.
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After losing narrowly to Munster in the final regular-season league game of the United Rugby Championship, the Lions travelled directly up the road from Limerick to Dublin — where they have been granted plenty of time to plot a massive knockout ambush on Leinster in their quarter-final clash on Saturday.
Leinster, of course, will have been giving the Lions scarcely a second's thought over the past week because they had a much bigger fish to fry — namely, their gruelling Champions Cup final against Bordeaux-Bègles.
The structural reality that Leinster contested a major European final this past weekend, and must turn around a week later to navigate a sudden-death quarter-final, is widely viewed as a distinct disadvantage as physical and mental fatigue inevitably kick in.
However, the Lions will have absolutely none of that narrative — they are thoroughly relishing their underdog status as they cultivate a powerful team theme of “making history”, as their coaching staff have aptly put it.
“No one’s giving us a chance, and sometimes it’s not a bad thing at all to take the underdog tag,” head coach Ivan van Rooyen said from the team's Dublin base. “We have massive expectations and genuine excitement for this quarter-final, and we see it as a golden opportunity for us as a group to take a major step forward and make history against what is effectively a Test outfit.”
Regardless of how Leinster fared in their European final against Bordeaux, Van Rooyen is fully bracing for the strongest possible luxury line-up from the hosts.
“Ten to one Leinster will pick an even stronger, star-studded team for the quarter-final,” he added. “But we have big expectations and are massively excited for the challenge.”
Lions defence coach Jaque Fourie added that the franchise's relative inexperience compared to the serial-winning Leinster machine could ultimately prove to be a blessing in disguise on Saturday afternoon.
“We are playing in a high-stakes quarter-final with a very young group of guys,” Fourie explained. “The really nice thing about it, if you consider rising players like flankers Siba Mahashe and Batho Hlekani… they’re so young that they sometimes don’t even care about the elite opponents they’re up against on the park.
“They just want to go out there and play rugby. Sometimes, that’s a really nice thing because they don’t overthink the sheer magnitude of the occasion. It is a massive quarter-final, but for us as a management group, the entire team has to completely buy into our tactical plans.
We all know that play-off rugby is a completely different beast where absolutely anything can happen. We must just be physically and mentally up for it on the day and give it our absolute all.”