O’Gara: We can’t have any complaints

BACK in 2000, the Munster contingent on the Irish squad didn’t have much time to feel sorry for themselves after the Heineken Cup final defeat by Northampton.

Almost immediately, they were whisked away on a tour of America and Canada.

Likewise, the current crop have already assembled in Killiney with their Irish colleagues to prepare for the start of the Six Nations Championship in Cardiff on Sunday week. Perhaps that’s a good thing because to concentrate too much on what happened at Thomond Park on Saturday wouldn’t do a whole lot for their morale.

“We can’t have any complaints, the better team won and fair play to them”, said Ronan O’Gara. “They talked it up and walked the walk. They were hugely dominant up front and clinical at the break down. Our intention was to put Ian Humphreys under pressure, but we didn’t get near him because their pack performance was terrific. We fell down everywhere. None of us played to our potential, we made a few errors and our start wasn’t great. The second half performance was good, but we probably needed to get stuck into them earlier.

“It is hugely disappointing for the last game. We feel we let the whole province down. There are two ways of reacting to this, you either sit down or else get up and put up a fight and, knowing the character of our dressing-room, I don’t need to tell you which one it will be.

“Our record here and the fact that it was the last game didn’t prey on our minds beforehand, but I think it will now. We made a balls of it and that’s something the 22 have to live with.

“There’s a break after this and we can forget about European rugby for a while. But when we reassemble, we’ll be glad to get back together again and I’d prefer to be sitting here now rather than after defeat in the quarter-finals. We’ll see what happens then.”

“We got off to a bad start and that cost us”, skipper Paul O’Connell acknowledged. “They played a very clever game and a very powerful style of rugby and they were very good at it. To turn 8-6 down at half time having played with that kind of wind was disappointing. These things happen. We’ve always said records were made to be broken. Now we’ll see what we’re made of and how we come back. We probably didn’t play to our best but that doesn’t take away from Leicester. We’ve got to compliment the way they played and the intensity they had around the ruck. Their scrum was excellent and also their ball carrying. I can’t say it was down to us.

“Leicester won the game and proved themselves an excellent team. We were negated early on by how well they performed.

“I thought we played pretty well in the second half, but didn’t get the breaks we needed.”