Munster supporters ready for Leicester
The mother, in rapt concentration, suddenly realises her child has gone quiet. The little boy was facing rearwards over her shoulder and with some horror, she sees him happily gnawing on something. She swings around and grabs the offending item with some degree of puzzlement. "What the hell is he eating?"
A quiet Limerick-accented man immediately behind her on the terrace responds apologetically. "Ah, sure it's only a crubeen."
"A what?" the startled woman demands.
"A pig's trotter," comes the answer. "Sure he looked hungry."
"A pig's trotter?" she repeats in disbelief, grabbing the offending grizzled knuckle from the child. "I've never heard anything so disgusting in my whole life."
"Ah," came the measured response, "wait 'til you hear the score at the end. Then you'll be really disgusted."
The Munster experience the experience not of coming up against a rugby team, but an army of supporters, many of whom have had to forego support of their country to get to as many Munster games as possible is one that has already become legend across Europe.
Such is the phenomenon of Munster and their supporters, opponents are going to extraordinary lengths to try and nullify not only the team on the pitch, but also the fans on the terraces. Leicester have already tried with their desultory offer of 1,000 tickets for the Welford Road Heineken Cup quarter-final. Clearly they are unaware of Munster doggedness, never mind flexibility. Beziers, Paris, Vicarage Road, Castres, Twickenham, Newport, Bordeaux. You name it, they've been there. Much as the players have had to make great personal sacrifices to get to two European Cup finals and two Celtic League finals over the past four years, so too have the fans had to make sacrifices to feed their growing addiction to one of the great fixes in Irish sporting history.
David Fitzmaurice and his pals from Listowel Rugby Club Kevin Woulfe from the Horseshoe Bar, Pat Walsh, Billy Keane and John O'Keeffe form part of a hardcore of around a dozen Kerry supporters who have travelled to Munster games, home and away, for the last six years.
An accountant by profession, he says he can spot the Munster fans among his clientele by reading the book-keeping entries which are marked "sale of cattle" or "sale of sites".
"We've been to all the games this season and I think the most pertinent point to make is the comradeship. Take the Munster matches and the internationals and there's no comparison. There's also great rivalry between the Cork and Kerry supporters, but even the rebels and the animals come together when it comes to supporting Munster.
"There's a real common bond between us all. We enjoy all the banter and have a great sing-song as well. It's great to see the same faces at every match and there's been some great friendships built up over the years.
"I've heard of a lot of supporters selling sites and selling cattle to make the price of the trips but thanks be to God, the price of property keeps going up. If it didn't we wouldn't be able to keep following Munster. Some of them would sell their wives if they could.
"Look at the trips we have in front of us. After the Celtic League final in Cardiff we have a trip to Leicester to save for and then it's either Toulouse or Northampton. It's very expensive compared to Leinster and their lucky draw. They have everything on their plate and you can be sure it's a lot more difficult supporting Munster. The draws have not been kind to us, especially in Kerry. A lot of us are in dire straits because the Leicester game on April 13 clashes with the Listowel races.
"We've found over the years that the one-day trips are not good value. They're very expensive so we try and go for two or three days whenever we can. But it's getting very, very expensive building up credits with the wives. But we keep telling them, 'we've started something so we'll have to finish it'."
Step one is today.
For Fitzmaurice the bond between players and fans is an integral part of what makes Munster so special.
"It's very important to all of us. The players are very friendly to us and always make themselves available for pictures and so on.
"The players always interlink with the fans and as we would say in Kerry, 'We're all plain men' we all eat our dinners in the middle of the day and we travel light when we follow Munster. We have enough of a job minding ourselves let alone anything or anybody else.
"But we stick together. We share friendship, comradeship and good humour; it's one great big family."
It's not all plain sailing though. Shannon fan Eddie Kane is one of the longest-serving members of the Munster Supporters Club but a newly-purchased house means he'll watch today's game from his armchair in Limerick.
"I remember going to the matches and there was only 4,000-odd people going up there," Kane said. "But it was always something special, even when they weren't winning. And then it was great to get behind the Munster team when the big teams came over to play us, the likes of Wasps and so on, who got to Thomond Park and were beaten. Even though we mightn't have qualified for the second round or the quarter-finals or whatever, we'd taken a great scalp. And it's grown from that core of support really.
"We paid so much money following the team last year but it's just getting so expensive. The travel agents are getting on our backs and the whole thing about getting tickets and accommodation is the problem with Munster now, not the losing. I'm going to have start going into the Credit Union during the close season just so I can go to these games.
"Now we've got a trip to Leicester and I said to myself I'd sacrifice the Celtic League final and just get saving for the Heineken quarter-final. I don't know how I'm going to manage it. The final may be in Dublin but we've two massive matches in front of us before then and you're looking at maybe 600 for each trip both in a month. Yet we always seem to end up in our thousands in these places."
One such place that sticks in the mind for Kane is Newport, when Munster came back from two tries down at Rodney Parade to turn over Gary Teichmann and his colleagues in the depths of South Wales.
"I've been to all the finals and so on, but that Newport game was something special for me.
"The Welsh were really getting on our backs with this tune 'Who Let The Dogs Out' and turning up the volume when they scored those two tries. But then we turned it round and it was our turn to turn up the noise. We started singing 'Who Let The Claw Out'. The Welsh boys just stayed silent for the rest of the match. It was just brilliant."
Pick any game, though, and it will hold a special place in the heart of a travelling Munster fan.
David Fitzmaurice's came in Bordeaux.
"We've had some momentous trips, none of which we can mention in print; as the saying goes, what happens abroad has to stay abroad! "But if there's one special memory it has to be Bordeaux in 2000, when we beat Toulouse in the semi-final against all the odds. The Munster players came out before the match for their warm-up and they did it right in front of the French supporters, just to show they weren't afraid. It was a great moment and as the Latin saying goes: Vini Vici Vidi we came, we saw we conquered.
"For me that was the defining moment of Munster abroad. We'd been to France before and been wiped out but that was the day we went into the lion's den and came out the other end fans as well as players. It was an unbelievable atmosphere, I saw grown men cry and nobody wanted to leave the stadium."
What defines this phenomenon? The unbearable excitement; living on the edge; pulling the fat from the fire; camaraderie; maybe a drink or two. Believing the unbelievable; dreaming the impossible dream.
"I'll tell you what it's about," says Seamus Brislane, a committed supporters' club member from Tipperary, "it's about Michael Galwey leading his team out at Twickenham, like men going to war, then losing the game and still having respect enough for the fans to take his men around that stadium afterwards to thank them. That was no doubt my greatest sporting moment. It was absolutely incredible the bond between those players and those fans, even in defeat."
Cork solicitor, Declan O'Toole, another supporters' club stalwart, carries the tickets from each games with him at all times as cherished memories of the highs the Munster team has given him and his family.
"I'm half afraid they'll win the Celtic League," he says, "because my wife will tell me that now they have a trophy in the cabinet, I'll have to stop travelling. I don't think I've been at home any weekend in January for the last four years or so. I've gone everywhere with them, but my daughter and my son have been a lot of games with me and at this stage they are adamant they won't let me go without them, so there's a lot of family in-fighting going on."
It's worth it though, Declan reckons, because there is nothing to compare with the joy the team provides when they are firing on all cylinders, more so than Ireland.
This is a point Seamus Brislane supports wholeheartedly because he's stopped supporting the national team.
"I don't mean that in a bad way, I mean it in the sense I don't go to their home games any more. I can't afford it. I work hard, but I'm not made of money and what I can afford to spend, I spend following Munster."
He illustrates Munster's extraordinary ability to draw support from all corners with a story involving a friend of his, Jimmy Deane, who happens to be a Roscommon football selector.
"Roscommon had a friendly against Sligo the day Munster played Gloucester and they were into the second half when Jimmy's son came running from the car where he was listening to the action from Thomond Park. 'Dad, they've got the third try.' "They abandoned their own match on the spot and all jumped into their cars to listen to the end of the match. Apparently the hooting of car horns that went on when Munster won was unbelievable. And none of them are from next or near Munster, but it illustrates the drawing power Munster have."
Declan O'Toole concurs: "When we lost Declan Kidney and The Claw and Mick Galwey effectively as well, we all thought it would take a couple of years to re-build, but they've taken us all by surprise and we're in a Celtic league final and we're still in the Heineken Cup. They have an unbelievable capacity to surprise everyone even us."
It's not been all plain sailing 'shattered in Twickenham and shat on in Cardiff' as one fan had it but the downs have more than been matched by the ups. The nail-biting tension in Paris against Stade Francais, the numbing joy of defeating Toulouse in Bordeaux.
These are the essence of the Munster thing just like well cooked and lightly salted pigs' feet.
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