Man-of-match Foley head and shoulders above the rest

WHEN the going gets tough, they say, the tough get going and the adage was never more apt than in the wind and rain at Thomond Park on Saturday as Anthony Foley stood head and shoulders over every other player on the field.

He would have been even more effective had not referee Hugh Watkins afforded the Harlequins defenders far too much freedom to challenge him from well inside the ten metre line as he took a succession of free kicks while he was also less than pleased at the sin-binning of Marcus Horan and his ‘Quins rival Maurice FitzGerald after only the third scrum of the match.

“Obviously I thought it was too early and it was a bit harsh and didn’t resolve matters,” said Foley. “It’s a judgment call from the referee. The laws says the scrum has to be square, that you have to drive straight. But look at any scrum that went down tonight, they had clearly come straight across on Frankie [Sheahan].

“At one stage, I had to question the referee because I was worried about Frankie’s safety the way they were scrummaging. The same at the line-out. They were cute enough. They were able to whip us down on a lot of occasions. Some referees would blow that, but you’ve got to play the referee that’s there. We got away with it as well.

“Other than that, I’d rather stick to our own discipline than worry about referees. If you go out every week worrying about referees, you’ll have an awful lot of strife, so we’ll concentrate on ourselves and get ourselves right. We still have to put eighty minutes together, but I’m happy with the win.

“Into the wind in the second half when it was put up to us, we showed a lot of character. A lot of people had written off ‘Quins. Their position over in England doesn’t do justice to the team they have and we knew that going into the game. They have a very physical pack and it showed out there today and at the end of the day, we’ll take it.”

Foley was one of those given an extended pre-season break by the IRFU and he feels he is already benefiting from that strategy, pointing out that “after three or four games you’re ready. People will look for excuses but we won’t give any. We just want to improve our performance. We’re a very self-critical side. It’s important that next week we get in a few good days at training and rectify what we feel went wrong during the game.”

Ronan O’Gara explained how the weather forecast had suggested it would get wetter and windier the longer the evening went on and that they would have played against the elements had they won the toss. This was the one area where Foley got it wrong.

Munster failed to build on the superb tries scored by Anthony Horgan and Denis Leamy and it made for a difficult and often frustrating eighty minutes.

“We needed a good start and had we not bombed a few tries in the first half, it could have been a different game,” O’Gara reasoned. “We threw a few 50-50 passes instead of retaining the ball, the wind was difficult but no more so than it was for them. In the first half, there was space on the outside but throwing long passes was risky and maybe we’d have been better off holding on to it and building phases. We’ll have to improve our communication a little bit.”

Much post-game conversation centred on the decision of Foley and O’Gara to chase a seven pointer when a penalty kick slotted between the posts would have put nine points between the sides and clinched a Munster win. Foley saw it like this: “We were trying to get another try on the board and kill them off. If that had come off, then maybe we could have got the four tries. You gamble sometimes and it doesn’t pay off and fortunately it didn’t cost us too much on this occasion.”