URC SEMI-FINAL PREVIEW: Pressure is on Bulls to maintain proud SA record

For most of the 2025/2026 Vodacom URC season it was the DHL Stormers who flew the South African flag and looked the best placed to keep the local record of at least one team being involved in the final weekend alive. That changed when they lost their last league game to Cardiff.

In slipping to defeat on the 4G surface three weeks ago, the Stormers condemned themselves to having to do it the hard way. Had they won at Cardiff Arms Park, which they should have been expected to do even though no one would deny Cardiff have become a decent team, they’d have finished second on the log and they’d be hosting Leinster in their semifinal.

Leinster at home would still have been a formidable mountain to climb but at DHL Stadium, as the Vodacom Bulls showed when they smashed Leinster physically in the corresponding semifinal at Loftus in 2024, Caelan Doris’ team would have been beatable. At the AVIVA Stadium? Not so much, and since the Cardiff Arms Park game, the Stormers have also lost the services of the world’s best flyhalf, Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, to injury.

The announcement of the international-laden Leinster team for the game on Thursday afternoon confirmed the magnitude of the task at a venue where Leinster have not lost this season and hardly ever lose. Almost every position is filled by an Ireland international. And among the few names in the match day 23 who have not played for Ireland you will find Rieko Ioane. He’s an All Black.

NOT NEWS THAT LEINSTER ARE STRONG FAVOURITES

So it shouldn’t be news to anyone that Leinster start as strong favourites, as they are to win the entire competition, and have been even through the times this season when they have struggled. There was a time when Leinster at full strength and under strength weren’t that much different, but that has changed. Leinster’s strongest team is equipped to go all the way and once they were gifted their second position by the Stormers, meaning they didn’t have to travel for a semifinal, they were in the pound seats.

They may have to travel next week for the final, but that depends on Glasgow Warriors beating the Bulls - which is far less of a gimme than Leinster’s chances of winning against the Stormers.

GLASGOW LOOK VULNERABLE

There was a time this season when, like the Stormers, Glasgow were flying and looked strong contenders to do the double, meaning win the URC and the Investec Champions Cup.

But their bubble burst when Toulon knocked them out of the Champions Cup at the quarterfinal stage, and in truth, it may have started unravelling for them a week before that. The Bulls exposed vulnerabilities in the Glasgow makeup in their round of 16 Champions Cup game at the Scotstoun and were unlucky to lose by four points.

Glasgow then had their vulnerability more thoroughly exposed on their tour to South Africa, where they conceded over half a century of points against the Fidelity SecureDrive Lions at Ellis Park and close to that against the Stormers at DHL Stadium the following week. They weren’t that flush in beating Ulster away in their final league game either.

So while Glasgow topped the log, they do look more beatable than Leinster, and on top of that they won’t have their Scotstoun 4G pitch as an ally this time. Although many of their players do play for Scotland, who have Saturday’s venue, Scottish Gas Murrayfield, as their headquarters, Glasgow won’t have quite the same advantage playing on grass that they do on 4G.

In that sense the Bulls have profited from some luck, as indeed they may have when Feinberg-Mngomezulu kicked the penalty that secured the Stormers their losing bonus point in Cardiff that clinched them third place to the Bulls’ fourth. Had the Stormers been heading to Murrayfield as the fourth seed, they’d also have a good chance, given they beat Glasgow 48-12 not that long ago.

PLAYING FOR A CAPE TOWN FINAL

Where third place is an advantage is if the Stormers end up playing the Bulls in the final - it would be in Cape Town due to their higher seeding. And that can still happen. If the Bulls win earlier in the afternoon, the Stormers will know they are playing for a home final. That is great motivation. And they shouldn’t be completely written off, for although the dice is loaded against the Stormers, they do have arguably the strongest pack in the competition and Jurie Matthee is no mug as a replacement for Feinberg-Mngomezulu.

Where the Stormers have definitely been weakened is out wide, where the pace of Seabelo Senatla made a big difference last week before he suffered the concussion that ruled him out of Saturday’s game.

The Stormers do have a chance, it just isn’t a good one, and will depend on them replicating what they did against Glasgow and in the second half of the away games against the Bulls and Munster. I’d hesitate to say the Bulls are favourites because Glasgow have the street smarts, but SA extending the record of having a team in the URC final every year hinges on the Pretoria team.

Vodacom URC semifinals (Saturday, 6 June)

Glasgow Warriors v Vodacom Bulls (Scottish Gas Murrayfield, Edinburgh, 3:30pm SA time)

BIG GAME LOADING 🔥

🆚Glasgow | 6 JUNE | 15:30 | 📍Murrayfield@Vodacom #URC | @URCOfficial_RSA pic.twitter.com/UEUKqrnqYV — Official Blue Bulls (@BlueBullsRugby) June 4, 2026

There are a surprising number of people who consider the Bulls to be outright favourites to win and it is true they have red-hot form currently, but here’s a bit of perspective - most of the Bulls’ form has been built up in games played at Loftus. They aren’t playing Glasgow on 4G, which would make it much tougher, but they will be playing them in front of what should be a large and partisan Murrayfield crowd (Glasgow and Edinburgh are close enough to each other for Glasgow to expect massive support).

As previous winners of the competition and also being almost a shadow Scotland team, the hosts will also have the street smarts that the Bulls still occasionally lack. Even in last week’s imperious performance in thumping Munster, there were times in the first half when they became a bit loose and let Munster score points that gave them faint crumbs of sustenance that they didn’t deserve.

Having said that, playing on grass will give the Bulls’ scrum the opportunity to get a strong foothold. Quite literally. This will be the last game Wilco Louw plays for the Bulls if they don’t win, hooker Johan Grobbelaar is in outstanding form, and the Bulls generally have more depth at forward than their opponents. Unlike last year when they lost the final to Leinster, or for that matter the year before that when they lost to Glasgow, the Bulls also have a double World Cup winner at flyhalf in Handre Pollard and the most in-form scrumhalf in the competition in Embrose Papier, who has just been named as the player of the tournament. Out wide you will find the likes of Canan Moodie, Kurt-Lee Arendse and Willie le Roux. That’s enough for me to tip the Bulls, but the bookies, who make it a three-point game, are right. It should be close.

Prediction: Vodacom Bulls to win by 5 points.

Leinster v DHL Stormers (AVIVA Stadium, Dublin, 6:30pm SA time)

Next job is a @Vodacom #URC Semi-Final in Dublin. #inittogether pic.twitter.com/ip37m58C0W — DHL Stormers (@THESTORMERS) June 1, 2026

Perhaps the biggest thing in the Stormers’ favour against a Leinster team that is virtually a shadow Ireland side and playing at home is that they can see it as a free hit. There shouldn’t be any expectation of a Stormers win. Indeed, no visiting team from the ranks of the URC should be heading to AVIVA Stadium with any expectation, and while the Bulls did beat them in a semi at the RDS Arena in 2022 and Munster at the AVIVA a year later, there was context to both. In 2022 Leisnter were playing their semifinal against the Bulls just six days after they’d lost an agonisingly close Champions Cup final against La Rochelle in Marseille. The Munster game in 2023 saw Leinster field an under-strength team because of the proximity to that year’s European final, which was played at the AVIVA.

Nope, it would be a case of thinking with the heart rather than the brain to predict a victory for a Stormers team that is missing two Springbok halfbacks and would have wanted Seabelo Senatla’s pace to be present on the wing to stand their best chance. But the memory of what they did to a full-strength Munster in the second half in Limerick does present just a glimmer of hope.

When the Stormers lost to Cardiff it was their first overseas loss in their URC campaign, and it was on 4G. So they haven’t tasted defeat overseas except on 4G, and that says something. Many of their wins were also achieved with Jurie Matthee at flyhalf. A 44-21 win over Cardiff, on a day where not everything went their way, is also not something to be scoffed at. Cardiff have mongrel these days. Their previous game on grass was the thumping win over Glasgow.

So if the Stormers can bring their A game, and their forwards can bring the physicality that made Leinster look so vulnerable to the French teams in the Champions Cup (it wasn’t just Bordeaux-Begles that managed to make an impression against them, so did Toulon for periods of the quarterfinal), the Cape team could be more competitive than many seem to be expecting.

Given their underdog status, a strong performance in a losing cause might be good enough for the Stormers to arrive home emboldened about their chances of attaining future success with the reinforcements that will arrive during the off-season. That’s what Leinster are - a good measuring stick of where the Stormers stand right now in relation to their future ambitions to compete across both competitions and their director of rugby’s much spoken of Project 2029.

Winning will require a much better defensive effort against an intricate attacking system than we have seen recently from a Stormers team that looked vulnerable between flyhalf and centre last week, a much better conversion rate from 22 entries, and also a lot more luck from refereeing/match official decisions than visiting teams usually get at the AVIVA.

Prediction: Leinster to win by 12.