Comment: Rob Houwing, Sport24 chief writer

Cape Town – The Bulls have stampeded their way into another Vodacom Super 14 final … and a healthy tally of their herd must be majestically heading toward the Springbok gate as well.

Loftus’s pride showed their championship mettle for a second successive Saturday – not to mention contributing to another five-star game from a spectacle point of view – and only the Chiefs now stand in the way of the Bulls adding a 2009 engraving to their 2007 debut on the trophy.

The men from Hamilton will bring physical and other qualities to match or even eclipse some of those exhibited by their compatriot Crusaders in an honourable semi-final defeat.

But will they also find the arduous long haul to the highveld for a one-off crunch a bridge too far?

Smart money says the Bulls have Pretoria fervour, momentum, bottle and multi-dimensional aspects to their game – the latter a characteristic in shorter supply a few years ago – in sufficient doses to see off the Chiefs’ challenge too.

And if the rugby is half as rousing as it was on Saturday, it will be worth the Bulls faithful queuing in ticket-seeking droves at dawn to fill their stronghold to capacity again for the showpiece.

They will deserve to have swathes of the broader country behind them as they go about the task – not least because an ever-increasing battery of Bulls representatives seem likely grace the Springbok jersey against the British and Irish Lions.

The semi against the street-wise, seven-time champion Crusaders only injected impressive muscle to the Bok aspirations of several blue-jerseyed customers.

For starters, we can surely shelve for the short-term the passionate Pierre Spies v Ryan Kankowski debate: incumbent first-choice No 8 Spies, barring mishap, is going to run out deservedly for the first Test at Kankowski’s home base of Durban.

The human freight train was immense on Saturday, finally turning in the sort of 80 minutes of power and purpose he has sometimes been guilty of doing in too-selective bursts.

There can be few more enthralling sights than a breakout Spies sprint to the try-line - sort of a rhino on a diet of double-espressos, if you like -- and we got one of his better ones just before half-time, the icing on a blinding eight-minute passage of play in which the Bulls turned a 13-point deficit into a seven-point lead which pretty much doused the Crusaders’ aspirational fire.

“We were perhaps a little bit shell-shocked at half-time,” losing captain Richie McCaw conceded, once the dust had finally settled on a footballing sizzler.

Dewald Potgieter, mind you, wasn’t far behind in terms of dynamic work-rate, and if this blond Bulls discovery of 2009 played his rugby in any other country but outrageously loosie-laden South Africa, you might be forgiven for thinking he was headed swiftly into imminent international combat as well.

Gurthro Steenkamp’s scrummaging technique may reveal certain vulnerabilities and inconsistencies at times, but the loosehead prop’s belligerent industry and pile-driver qualities are such that he warrants fresh consideration for a Springbok Test 22, even if not necessarily ahead of Beast Mtawarira in a run-on XV.

And at least two Bulls backline players who are yet to sample top-tier Test warfare have shot themselves to the front of the job-seeking line in presently ill-staffed Bok areas: fullback and flyhalf.

Zane Kirchner played the semi-final with assuredness and no lack of finesse; he is clearly one of the key beneficiaries of the freshening and X-factor assistant coach Pieter Rossouw has masterminded among the Bulls’ outside backs.

Just as significant was the sight of Morne Steyn, not for the first time at the business end of the Super 14, doing something you so desire from a No 10: bossing a match.

That was especially apparent in the second half, as the Bulls forwards finally got a really firm foothold and Steyn revelled as both distributor and kicker for the corner flags.

Oops, did I forget his dropped goals? The man-of-the-match was positively Naas-like on the day, at so appropriate a venue for demonstration of the trade – his quartet of them helped provide much of the scoreboard daylight between the sides, especially in the important last quarter.

The fourth was the real beauty; he was two paces in from the halfway line and it was so sweetly struck that he could have launched it from inside his own territory and it would still have crossed the bar with two inches to spare.

Already boasting massively proven, shoe-in stalwarts like Fourie du Preez, Bryan Habana, Victor Matfield and Bakkies Botha, the Bulls’ component of the national side is going to be a robust one, come the Lions, unless Peter de Villiers and company have some very eccentric curveballs in mind.

Two of the three Lions Tests are at altitude, back to back, and in a battery of Bulls luminaries lie athletes primed for the demands of that lung-burning environment …