OPINION:
By hook, or by crook, no one at Eden Park really cared how the Blues made it into the final, just as long as they did.
To lose next week at home to the Crusaders would be a nasty business and yet somehow the pain that would have come
Gregor Paul: The one key reason Blues avoided semifinal disaster
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Hoskins Sotutu of the Blues celebrates after scoring a try during the win over the Brumbies. Photo / Getty
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They are a side with precisely no frills, no tricks cleverly hidden from view and nothing much other than honest grunt, a driving maul to die for, a tactically astute halfback and a straight-running midfield who know how to take a half-chance.
It's effective and functional but it feels like it should always be beatable and so there was an immediate sense of angst when one of those straight-running midfielders, Irae Simone, opened the game by running through Stephen Perofeta's ghost tackle to touch down under the posts.
And it was an angst that was never fully vanquished. It certainly rescinded when the Blues found something of a rhythm in the first half.
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The weather was awful and never conducive to them being able to open things up the way they wanted, but they managed to be highly enterprising in patches nevertheless.
Good enough to score two well-made tries and give a sense of being in control. But they never managed to quite put the Brumbies away during that period and the longer the game went on, the more the nerves gripped and blighted their execution and decision making.
By the final quarter, after picking up two yellow cards, it was obvious the Blues were hanging on. They couldn't string anything together.
They couldn't hold the ball for long enough to mount any pressure and the confidence drained out of them. It was as if they couldn't stop thinking about how they really shouldn't be so troubled by a team with such limitations and yet were.
But this was a night when the how didn't matter. Outcome not process was what it was all about and the Blues sneaked home and into their first final since 2003 because they had one quality that mattered.
They had resilience. And that is the difference between the Blues of 2022 and many of their previous versions, they have a calm and resilience about them that was best typified by Perofeta.
He brushed off that first missed tackle – threw any negativity out of his head and got on with kicking his goals, marauding in the backfield and producing yet another effective and creative performance.
He also splatted the next runner that came down his channel and it's this new-found ability to flush mistakes and keep their head in the game that took the Blues past the Brumbies and has indeed been the key to their whole campaign.
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What they have is a good, old-fashioned ability to roll up their sleeves and persevere: or as Chumbawamba put it, to get knocked down and get back up again.
When they were reduced to 14 men midway through the second half because of a Kurt Eklund yellow card, they held up about as well as could be expected.
They scrambled for long enough to stop the Brumbies scoring quickly and now Aucklanders can breathe a little easier as if the Blues are to be denied the title they so desperately crave, then at least they know it will be at the last step and to a team that can hand on heart say they deserved their moment.
