Axel eager to keep on rolling

ANTHONY FOLEY makes his 75th appearance in the Heineken Cup leading Munster out against Leinster at Lansdowne Road on Sunday.

He stretches his lead at the top of the “Elite 50 Club” over Fabien Pelous of Toulouse, and with no foreseeable end to his reign as Munster’s first choice number eight and captain, he may well go on to set a mark of European games that nobody will be able to equal, let alone surpass.

Without quite admitting as much, he regards Sunday’s game as the most important of the lot.

He conceded that it fits the bill: “because it’s the next one. A lot of stuff has been said and written over the past couple of weeks and will be again for the next few days. From a player’s point of view, you’ve got to avoid getting caught up in that and play it like a normal game. It’s very hard to do but you’ve got to try and do it. Come Monday morning, life will go on and you’ve got to be prepared for that and hope that you’ll still be there.”

When it was suggested that the manner of Leinster’s quarter-final victory over Toulouse entitled them to favourite status, a wide smile spread across Foley’s face.

Then he handed the “hospital pass” along to coach Declan Kidney who, in his customary deadpan manner, replied: “All of the players and coaches and everybody involved in the teams respect one another. We wouldn’t be going into that. All the facts are there and it’s for other people to decide how things lie. For us, it’s a job, a case of getting on with the game, getting on with the job in hand. That said, the Leinster forwards have managed to train together barring Mal’s [O’Kelly] international duties en bloc for the whole season and have got better and better until now they are a formidable unit.

“Maybe Toulouse caught them on one or two things but overall they outplayed the Toulouse pack and any pack capable of doing that in their own backyard is very good. They got plenty of ball, they retained it well, they’re very mobile, they can defend well, they can do everything you’d expect from a modern day pack.”

There is little doubt that all connected with the Munster squad were more than pleased with the 35-13 defeat of Edinburgh Gunners in last week’s Celtic League tie at Thomond Park. There was an extra spring in their step coming on top of three successive defeats and it was all the better given the similarity in styles between Edinburgh and Leinster. So was that the perfect preparation for Sunday? “That would be to try and second guess the way Leinster are going to play but it was a good game,” said Kidney. “There was a lot of ground to be covered and it probably tested us in a lot of different areas. Anybody watching it would have picked up on areas we needed to be tested on and some areas we weren’t tested on where we may be vulnerable.

“There were one or two more passes that went astray that we’ll be looking to improve on that. From an attacking point of view, it was a great lift; from a defensive point of view, it probably pointed out a few things that we need to work on. I’ve said all along it’s not who we will pick but rather who we leave out. We have a number of fellows who can adapt and go into different positions and that’s what the squad systems are all about now and no more so than in the European Cup.”

Like his coach, Foley took a degree of satisfaction from the Edinburgh victory.

“A win like that gives us the bit of confidence going into Sunday. The pace of the game was right up there and there were a lot of tired bodies in the changing rooms afterwards. We will get opportunities in Sunday’s game and we’ve just got to be clinical in those moments and take the scores, not to second guess ourselves and just keep playing. If you look back at the two Celtic League games, there was a massive intensity and it will be no different this time and no drop-off because we know the Leinster guys so well.”

A suggestion somewhere by Alan Quinlan that Munster’s defeat at the RDS on New Year’s Eve could be of benefit amused coach and captain alike given that the international flanker wasn’t playing that day! But Foley took the point and insisted: “I know you can learn a lot from a defeat but you’ve just go to get back on the horse again and we’ve done that a lot of times. I think the Edinburgh game before we played Castres had a big bearing on how things panned out as well. These are massive games for guys who weren’t involved in the Six Nations, myself included. This is their showpiece, their big opportunity, and there will be a lot of guys from both sides with a lot of points to prove.”