“We never discussed actually playing the way we did play, we just went that way.”
There’s a natural tendency to lean on the old Munster fall-backs on a morning like this. You can draw them around you like comfortable clothes: being written off. Having the bitterness. Producing when backs are to the wall.
Take a step back, though, and you can see beyond the fuzz to the hard-edged professionalism. Often post-match quotes can be boilerplate filler, but there were some interesting nuggets to be found if you looked closely after Munster’s win for the ages last Sunday.
“We probably threw a bit of a dummy against Glasgow. It wasn’t our intention; we were very low during the week,” — Paul O’Connell.
In retrospect, was too much read into that recent 51-24 defeat to Glasgow? Munster coach Rob Penney described it as “embarrassing”, but there were grounds for optimism.
Two Glasgow tries were freakish interceptions. The defensive system had held up apart from some individual mistakes: James Downey’s reducer on Mike Brown last Sunday showed that this had been rectified.
Harlequins weren’t sailing too smoothly themselves before Sunday anyway. They’d lost their previous league games, to Saracens and Gloucester, and while pundits vary in their evaluation of the quality levels in the Aviva Premiership and the RaboDirect Pro12, the prospect of relegation certainly concentrates minds in the English league and makes for punishingly competitive matches all year round.
That didn’t win Sunday’s game for Munster, but it didn’t help Harlequins either.
For their last league game, against Gloucester, they had to cobble a team together, which didn’t help either. In the red corner, though . . .
“He hasn’t played a lot recently and he will get better with more game-time. I suspect that by late June and early July, he will be humming,”— Rob Penney.
Indeed, the performance of Paul O’Connell is rightly being seen as central to Munster’s victory. Clearly the second row’s lack of mileage is a major asset at this point in the season.
Nobody would advocate serious back surgery and lengthy rehabilitation in preparation for an season-defining, if not epochal, game, but freshness is a distinct advantage when trophies are there to be won.
It’s an article of faith in Kilkenny, serial winners in another code, that you must have something in reserve for Croke Park.
On Sunday you saw the benefit of having world-class players spared — unwillingly, but spared nonetheless — the battering that’s dished out in the Six Nations.
If you doubt the significance of avoiding the tournament, look at Chris Robshaw. A few weeks ago the Harlequins flanker was competing for the Six Nations title and his club coach, Conor O’Shea, recognised the need to give him a break. Although O’Shea was quoted as saying there’d be no prospect of burnout with Robshaw, he still gave the England captain a week off at the end of March to try to recharge his batteries.
Did it work? Consider Sunday’s performance and make your own mind up.
Other Munster players had a similar build-up ahead of last weekend. Simon Zebo had played no rugby since the second week of February, when he broke a foot against England; Ronan O’Gara had been playing for Munster but had departed the international stage in early March.
“We never discussed actually playing the way we did play in the end, we just went that way. We had momentum and we had a good feel for what we were doing. I was chatting to ROG all the time and we were getting good information off the sidelines about what to do,”— Paul O’Connell.
As everyone knows, Munster have a new coaching ticket in place since the start of the season, and inevitably there’s a getting-to-know-you period. Results like the Glasgow game are inclined to cast doubts over the chemistry between players and management.
Yet last Saturday in these pages Munster coach Simon Mannix referred to the team playing in “the grey”. The New Zealander expanded: “If we take the grey area as being after set-piece, then we can only have a best guess, there, as to what opposing defences are going to do, obviously.
“So what you need are players who can make decisions based on what they’re seeing . . . that doesn’t happen overnight, and our results probably show that, but there’s an awful lot there for us to be encouraged by.”
He was correct. Apart from the benefits of having vast on-field experience particular to the Heineken Cup, canny observers have also pointed to the value of that cup rugby thread entwined in the Munster DNA. The basics of field position. The supremacy of the result over the aesthetics. In short the need, as Mannix also said, to find a way to say “yes” when everyone else is saying “no”.
