SO, ABOUT THAT Stormers video…

Jean Kleyn smiles as soon as the subject is broached. He says he hasn’t seen it, but he knows all about it.

In case you don’t: it was a clip of Stormers players, coaches, and their loved ones celebrating wildly in a corporate suite at their DHL Stadium moments after Munster had beaten Leinster at the Aviva, a result which meant that rather than having to travel to Dublin to face Leinster in the final, the reigning URC champions would instead host Munster in Cape Town.

Stormers head coach John Dobson would later clarify that his organisation were celebrating only the fact that the final would travel to them rather than the other way around.

The Stormers’ mission statement this season is to bring smiles to a city which has one of the highest poverty rates in South Africa, and being able to welcome 50-plus-thousand people from Cape Town to Saturday’s URC showpiece goes a long way towards achieving that much.

Munster lock Kleyn, who represented Western Province and Stormers for three years before his move to Ireland in 2016, has a first-hand appreciation of that sentiment.

Plus, he reckons he would have been celebrating too had Munster been gifted a surprise home advantage for this weekend’s decider.

“I don’t really take to go looking for those kinds of things and it didn’t cross my path,” Kleyn says. “I heard a lot about it, though. Look, I think any team that gets a home final would be delighted with it, you know? Whatever was said in the video or whatever happened, I’m not sure.

“From my perspective, I think if the roles were reversed, we’d be delighted as well. So, yeah, I’ve heard a lot of talk about the video but to be honest, it’s all a load of puff.

Any team getting a home final after thinking they’d be playing Leinster away, when that’s your other option; I think Munster at home seems pretty good. But I’d say we’ll see on Saturday what the result leads to.

Kleyn is at least vaguely aware that, within the video footage, Stormers hooker Joseph Dweba is seen and heard vowing to ‘fuck up’ his Irish opponents.

Dweba’s own mission statement has made for a topic of conversation during the South Africans’ press calls this game-week.

On Tuesday, Stormers forwards coach Rito Hlungwani defended his hooker as being “a very passionate rugby player” who has “a bit of a mouth on him”, and stressed that Dweba is “one guy who usually backs up his words”.

All of which is perfectly fine by Kleyn, who believes people are “reading way too much into it”.

“I think from the players’ standpoint”, Kleyn shrugs, “you can’t have your coach go, ‘Oh, no, we’re definitely not going to do that…’

I’d say they were probably a few beers in after the game, things were said, and you can’t back down after saying it like that, so I think that’s as much as is in it.

Naturally, Munster will be exchanging their own combative words in the private of their Cape Town base this week.

They’re a long way from home — again — but they’re also a million miles removed from a season-opening, seven-game stretch during which they won just twice.

It was a sequence of results which dictated that virtually every remaining game from late November onwards was of the utmost importance. Under pressure for most of the season to merely book a play-off berth, the fact that Munster have gone on to reach this final is plainly extraordinary.

Kleyn describes the extent to which head coach Graham Rowntree drilled the concept of ‘belief’ into his players until he was blue in the face, remaining on message even after those drearier early-season days in Newport and Galway.

The 29-year-old lock explains that Rowntree, his staff, and Munster’s players themselves have since managed to cultivate “a massive belief that the fella next to you is going to do his utmost best to not only perform for the team, but for you; not only as a teammate, but as a mate.

“I would say we’re as tight a group as we’ve ever been in the seven years I’ve been here,” Kleyn adds.

“Individually, I’d say the players are more tightly-knit across the board than they ever have been. We have academy guys interacting with senior players who have 200-plus caps for the club, having lunch together… It’s one of the most healthy team environments I’ve been involved with.”

A mark of how far Munster have come in just seven months is the contrast between the two trips to the Aviva to face Leinster that virtually bookend their season.

In October, Rowntree’s side showed glimpses of his preferred ideology before falling to a predictable defeat; two weekends ago, in a clash between admittedly more evenly matched sides on paper, Munster produced the most complete performance of the Englishman’s reign so far, earning a victory that few outside of their building had predicted beforehand.

Zoom out a bit, and not even Munster’s coaches themselves could have projected a URC final appearance in Year One of the new regime.

But while getting one over on Leinster in Dublin struck as being a key milestone in their development, Kleyn scoffs at the idea that it was especially significant — unless Munster can raise the trophy in Cape Town in three days’ time.

“We’re absolutely not in bonus territory,” he stresses. “There’s nothing ‘bonus’ about this. This is what we play for, this is what we’ve been working the last 48 weeks towards.

“It’s a final. It wasn’t a [trophy] ‘victory’ over Leinster in the semi-final. In the greater scheme of things, that means absolutely nothing to us. Like, why should a victory over Leinster in a semi-final be bigger than a victory over the reigning champions at their home ground?

“You’ve flown 10,000 kilometres to play in front of a crowd of 55,000 people, of which maybe 53,000 will be Stormers supporters. How is that overshadowed by a victory over Leinster?

“Look, I’m not taking anything away from the victory over Leinster. It was obviously a very big thing for us. But that’s not the be-all and end-all. That’s not why we play.

“Munster isn’t there to beat Leinster… Munster is there to win championships.”