Three weeks to remove the rust
Inevitably, Lansdowne Road won’t be able to cope with the demand to witness first hand this mouth-watering occasion and the desperate search for tickets is already well under way. Hopefully, the corporate sector will be told where to go this time and the real fans will get there instead.
It will be some occasion and while Leinster, after their heroics in Toulouse, have been understandably installed as favourites, it’s not quite as simple as that. True, Leinster looked a class act and a side that had been together every day for the last couple of months in running up 41 points in Toulouse, and Munster were frequently ill at ease and visibly rusty against Perpignan.
While they just about deserved to advance to their fifth semi-final, they fully realise the need for considerable improvement if they are to cope with a Leinster outfit that has already defeated them quite decisively in Dublin 4 this season.
Of course, a lot could change over the next three weeks and there is no doubt that Munster will be a far more cohesive outfit having played a Celtic League game against Newport Dragons next weekend and with several intensive training sessions under their belt. Individually, there was little amiss on Saturday with Paul O’Connell producing another herculean performance that earned him the man of the match award. As always, others will feel a little hard done by and certainly Donncha O’Callaghan was little, if anything, behind his second-row partner for overall effectiveness. And while any team would miss a player of the quality of Denis Leamy, Mick O’Driscoll fitted seamlessly in at number six for the entire second half.
The forward battle in general was no place for the faint of heart. It is unlikely Munster will come up against such a physical and powerful unit too often and they deserve every credit for the manner in which they stood up to the challenge and eventually shaded the battle. The line-out was a very productive area, the set scrum was solid and it was great to see Marcus Horan back to his best in the loose. It was an area in which Munster didn’t exactly sparkle, especially in the first half, but David Wallace and Anthony Foley were a lot more prominent on the turnover.
“You have to look at yourself in these games,” reasoned O’Connell. “When you come back after so long away, you have to concentrate on your own game and sometimes during the week we were thinking of Perpignan more than ourselves, so thinking of Leinster was the last thing on our minds,” said O’Connell, on his awareness or otherwise of the result in Toulouse before taking the field. “Now, though, we will look forward to it because it will be massive, we don’t have to go away from home, our supporters don’t have to go away from home and the same with the Leinster supporters.
“They won the last time we played with full sides. They have just put 41 points on Toulouse away from home. That’s a serious achievement. It’s going to be very tough for us but it’s great to be in the semi-final of the European Cup again. The key to every Munster performance is our work ethic and honesty. It’s not just the forwards but the wingers, everyone, work their socks off. That’s why it’s such a pleasure to play for Munster, you get 100% from every player. There’s no doubt that as a team we were rusty, but it was something we had to play down during the week and we had to try and convince ourselves we could hit the ground running.”
Well and all as the forwards withstood all that was hurled at them, one was totally lost in admiration at the contribution of half-backs Peter Stringer and Ronan O’Gara. The scrum-half has rarely had such a good all-round 80 minutes and that’s saying something, while O’Gara hardly looked like a man who was a doubtful starter in the hours leading up to the kick-off.
Coach Declan Kidney didn’t refer directly to the out-half’s dodgy hamstring except to claim that the decision to kick a few first half penalties to touch was purely tactical. He did mention that “the weather in Munster during the week was very bad and we trained on some very heavy pitches. Ronan is a perfectionist and that could have affected him. We took him off at the end just to give a young fella (Jeremy Manning) a bit of European experience. Ronan was very brave in going in for that ball in the second half and got a bad gash on the knee. But the medics got him up and he was vital in the last few minutes.”
It will be fascinating to see if the coach finds a place in the starting line-up for Christian Cullen against Leinster. The All-Black legend also came in for the dying moments and will assuredly be given game time against the Dragons.
Tomas O’Leary performed bravely at outside centre in his first ever game in the berth but those far more accustomed to operating there will be fully fit and ready in time for Leinster. The options to the coach are many and obvious but to his great credit he has deployed those players available to him extremely well all year and can be relied upon to do so again. It took courage to select Barry Murphy and Ian Dowling in the pool games and O’Leary in the centre on Saturday and can hardly be criticised on that score.
“Performances are always affected by the opposition you meet,” he maintained. “We know it wasn’t free flowing rugby and didn’t go beyond three phases too often. On and off the pitch, these boys have had a lot to contend with over the last two weeks. We would have taken any kind of a win. We kept our shape and composure and had enough confidence to see it through.”
Having departed the Leinster set-up in somewhat controversial circumstances 18 or so months ago, the forthcoming clash will have extra significance for Kidney. “It’s something we can all look forward to and it’s great for our supporters that they don’t have to travel too far again. It’s marvellous for Irish rugby that we have two Irish teams in the semi-final knowing we’ll have somebody in the final.”
As Jerry Flannery put it “the battle for tickets has started already”. And it won’t stop until the first kick of a mouth-watering contest has soared into Dublin 4 skyline.
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