Anthony Foley: Reaction of Axel’s peers says it all

Anthony Foley was a man whose deeds defined so much of what was great about Munster, writes Paul Rouse

There is a thing that binds together people who play sport with each other that cannot be shaken by time. It is more than sharing a field, more than sharing a dressing-room. It is related, in part, to remembrance of a time in your life when you were young and fit and able for everything.

The shadows cast on a life by the passage of years, by the inevitable struggles, by the things that go wrong, the failures, the disappointments, the frustrations do not darken the joy of that time as it recedes into the past. Instead, those shadows cast that joy in even starker relief.