‘It’s not the end of the world’

Q: Was it simply an ageing team growing old together?

Donal Lenihan: “There’s an element of that. If you look at the ages of the Munster players in the match programme then the mileage is there, and it’s almost inevitable that a team with so much experience — hundreds of Heineken Cup appearances among them — that you go to the well once too often. There’s a feeling that younger blood will have to be introduced over the next 12 months, but it would also be less than respectful not to recognise the achievements of some of the greatest players who’ve appeared in the tournament for over a decade. Players earn the right to a starting position, until such time as it’s deemed there’s someone better to take their place. For me the challenge now is not just that the younger players must be given an opportunity, but that they’ll have to be in a position to take that opportunity. That’s going to be a test for Munster.”

Q: Where will Munster source a cutting edge behind the scrum?

John Kelly: “There are players coming through from the academy all the time, and they’re being developed to play in the Heineken Cup and Magners League. There’s a lot of disappointment around at the moment after the defeat by Toulon, but it’s only a couple of months since a Munster side which featured very few of the first team beat Australia. Everybody was delighted then with the potential of the players coming through, something which seems to have been forgotten since Sunday. A lot of the players that night had just come through the academy but they also need time to get accustomed to a role in the first team. It’s hard to know how many guys will come through — that’s always difficult to predict, but there are good players out there, and that’s not just empty talk. The result against Australia is proof of that.”

Q: Is it time for a Carl Hayman-type signing?

Frankie Sheahan: “There needs to be change if Munster want to feature in the knock-out stages. It’s been well documented that you’re not going to win anything with an average scrum, you need a strong one to win a Heineken Cup. The disappointing thing is we didn’t really move on from that problem last year — it caught us then and it caught us this year as well. In the Ospreys game we weren’t up to it, basically, and that cost us the game over there.

I don’t think you need a Carl Hayman, though — a Freddie Pucciarello type would be ideal. Leinster, for instance, made a very shrewd signing in Heinke Van Der Merwe last year. He came over and credit Joe Schmidt, he decided to pick on form and picked him ahead of Cian Healy. What did Healy do? He came back and played some of the best rugby of his life on the back of that. That’s not something Munster do. Munster keep picking the same guys and even if a guy’s on form, like Mick O’Driscoll — how many man of the match awards has he picked up this season? — he may not be picked. What message does that send to the other players?”

Q: Is everybody over-reacting to one defeat?

Frankie Sheahan: “I think so. If you look at the records in 20 years’ time you won’t be looking at whether teams qualified for the quarter-final or not. You don’t get any silverware for that. Getting knocked out now allows the lads to focus on the Magners League, and there’s a trophy there to be won, which isn’t something to turn your nose up at. If you can take a trophy out of that competition and build for the future, that’s something. It was always going to happen eventually. The important thing is that while I don’t think anybody blames people for making mistakes, it’s not reacting to or learning from those mistakes that’s disappointing. The scrummaging issues have been very costly this year— and it was the same last year.”

Donal Lenihan: “There’s an expectation level out there — people expect Munster to be successful by right, but all great teams have days like Sunday. Even Kilkenny lost their bid for five-in-a-row, remember.”

John Kelly: “There’s been a complete over-reaction to the defeat last weekend. Not qualifying for the first time in 13 years is testament to what the team did for 12 years before that, and another team will hardly accomplish the same feat. People are saying ‘it’s the end of an era’ and so on, but they’re forgetting that it wasn’t the same players in the Munster team for that 12 years, even though there might have been a couple of guys who featured consistently for much of that time. There’s been a lot of turnover in that 12 years, new players coming in and others leaving. There’s been plenty of change all along. Also, people need to look at where Munster are at the moment — they’re top of the Magners League, and they’ve only lost five games all season. It’s not the end of the world. The defeat last Sunday was disappointing but they’ve had some bad luck in the competition and it just didn’t work out for them in Toulon.”