Where was I before we were rudely interrupted?

So where was I before we were so delightfully interrupted by the summer and before that, Racing 92’s first Top 14 championship in a generation?

Barcelona’s Camp Nou. In the lifetime of any professional sportsperson, performing in the Catalan cathedral, in front of 95,000 fans, must rank high on any bucket list. Even yesterday, down the river, stoking the fires that raged that June 24 against Toulon is too easy. Too easy for all of us in Racing.

We are not coping well with success. I got to a stage in my career with Munster and Ireland where I was expert at coping with failure. This is a different sort of problem I’d forgotten about, one Munster experienced in 2007 after our first European Cup success. We were brutal that year, but in 2008 we got our mojo back, motivated to a huge extent by an incredible group of players and leaders.