Ronan O'Gara: Eating with the enemy...Saturday dinner in Lens with Prendy
Plenty to chew on: Mike Prendergast and Racing 92 travel to Stade Bollaert Delelis in imposing form.
SOME might find it odd that I would share a menu and a bottle of red on Saturday night with a key coach in the Racing 92 set-up we will face Sunday in the Champions Cup semi-final.
To which one might point out that I know Mike Prendergast a lot longer than our cumulative years coaching in France. We came up through the ranks in Munster together. Plus, there are more things to talk about over a good catch-up on Saturday night in Lens than a match the next day. It will be good to decompress from preparation, stats and video analysis and chat other stuff.
Munster might even come up.
Besides, it might be one of the last opportunities we will get to grab some time together as he begins plans for the next phase of his coaching career, and more importantly family life, back home in Limerick.
If he saw me right now, I have the laptop open and a notepad of indecipherable squiggles as we road-test a couple of interesting variations to the normal playbook for the game. Doubtless, he is working on the same thing at home in Paris.
He’s making a plan to take us down, I am doing the same to my old Paris colleagues. This isn’t personal Sonny, it’s strictly business. With technology, video analysis and statistics, he has everything he needs on La Rochelle. There are next to no secrets nowadays.
Now that he has made public the decision to go home to Munster next season, I feel more comfortable discussing the decision. Munster are getting a guy in his prime, with a lot of experience and a great appreciation of the modern player. His work will be detailed and technical but importantly he has a soft spot for people to help get the best out of them.
He is going in as attack coach which, given his seniority, I would have presumed was assistant to Graham Rowntree. As attack coach, he is overseeing everything when Munster have the ball, from exits to transition to offensive sets. There’s a coach for everything these days, but Prendy is a master of these areas. So I would have envisaged Rowntree as head coach and Prendy as assistant coach but maybe the IRFU sees things differently and want another appointment as No 2. How could that not be Prendergast? The good thing is that Rowntree will let a lot of the pitch stuff to Mike, he will prep the scrum and forwards with Denis Leamy and possibly Andy Kyriacou, if the reports are correct.
There might be some Munster supporters watching in on Sunday curious to see how Racing 92 work with the ball and whether that could be a template for Munster. Don’t read too much into it – Mike’s framework would be evident in how Racing 92 play for sure, but it would be dictated by certain individuals – there aren’t many wingers like Teddy Thomas and there is no ten like Finn Russell.
The ironic bit is that after Sunday, one of us should be preparing to face our old province in the European Champions Cup final. There have been plenty of bouquets for Munster in the wake of last Saturday’s penalty defeat to Toulouse but there’s a pretty obvious point being missed too. They were 24-14 up at ‘home’, against a side that Munster would have felt they were better conditioned than – and didn’t close the deal. You’d hope and expect this week that the leadership group – whoever constitutes that now – would be calling out that fact and conducting a rigorous appraisal of the whys and why nots of their ultimate demise.
Given we were preparing for our own quarter final against Montpellier, I had only half an eye on the events at the Aviva. And when I saw the lop-sided scrum in the opening quarter, I resigned myself to to ‘there’s that one done’. When I tuned back in it was 24-14 Munster, and I was utterly bemused as to how that could happen. And there were further opportunities for Munster to choke off Toulouse’s air supply for good. We did point out here last week the defending champions’ special gift for finding a way to stay alive in challenging circumstances. But it felt like Munster reached down into that hole and gave them a hand-up. Against the European and Top 14 champions, that never ends well. That Damien de Allende dink-through moment looked like it was pre-ordained because there’s no way a World Cup-winning centre played what was in front of him with a three v two on the edges. You feed particular information to players, even world-class players, and they can presume that’s all they have to do.
The final moments of normal and extra time can be second-guessed until Christmas. It shouldn’t have come to either Ben Healy moment. At the end of normal time, I don’t know how seriously the leadership considered kicking to the corner - a right-footed penalty to a left-hand touchline did offer a seductive angle to set something up for what would inevitably have been the last play of the game. Of course, all that is moot if Healy’s monster book kicks the penalty. The victor writes the script. But from what I could see and hear, that Munster support, almost 40,000 of them, were ready to do anything they could, even carry the team over the line themselves, to be back in a European final.
No scrum, no win, goes the old mantra. However, Munster did steady the ship in that respect when John Ryan came in. Ultimately you look at the reasons Munster aren’t in the final and feel there has to be more to it than bad luck. In the heel of the hunt, is there a distinct style of play that they could trust when push came to shove? Did they stop playing at 24-14, resorting to manning the barricades, and as brave and defiant as that looked, it offered Toulouse unhindered access back into the semi-final.
Irrespective, it’s a big ask for Toulouse to return to the scene of the crime on Saturday and front up for 80 against a humming Leinster machine. Though Matthis Lebel did a passable impression of Cheslin Kolbe at times last Saturday, he isn’t the Springbok legend and they will need some bolts of lightning to bring down Leinster. As if Toulouse weren’t already up against it, home advantage will be huge for the boys in blue.
A full house at the Aviva will bring sharply into focus the empty seats we anticipate on Sunday at 4pm at the Stade Bollaert Delelis in Lens. The look will not be good for the organisers. The transport infrastructure between La Rochelle and Lens (seven hours away by road too) is not ideal and we are not expected to be there in force, supporter-wise. However on the field, it’s a natural surface in a soccer stadium, so it will be fast and warm. Just the conditions you want.
We looked dangerous with the ball against Montpellier last Saturday. We seem to have got a bit of bite back in our game now. It would be nice to get back to a final, but I know too well that this is the competition Racing 92 and their attack coach also love.
Friends before, friends after.
