Flannery: I was only trying to free my leg
Flannery could miss Saturday’s crucial Pool Five tie against London Wasps if the citing commissioner acts on clear video evidence of the incident.
But a defiant Flannery said: “All I know is that at one point in the game my leg was being held, and I was trying to free my leg.
“I may have caught someone but it was completely unintentional.”
The Limerick man, had a great personal battle over 80 minutes with Mario Ledesma, and reflected: “He’s a good player, it is always good to knock heads with those fellas who are up there in the international stage. Everyone is disappointed though, you put that much effort into something and only come away with a bonus point; we felt as the game went on it was there for the taking but we probably didn’t execute some of our plays as sharply as we should have. It probably equated with our first game, away to Wasps, a lot of energy expended and we only came away with a point, but we only have ourselves to blame.”
However, most Munster supporters would have settled for a bonus point beforehand.
The thousands of supporters in red left the ground in good spirits.
However, that wasn’t how the players felt about it.
“We came here expecting to win and take something from ASM,” reckoned captain Ronan O’Gara, a sentiment shared by former skipper Anthony Foley, who took over the spokesman duties while the captain received running repairs to a nasty head wound.
Said Foley: “We’re disappointed we lost.
“The first 30 minutes cost us, we didn’t play as well as we thought we could and it took a good second-half performance to keep us in this group.
“It looked at one stage like it was going to be the same old story — an Irish team in France (being beaten up).
“But we pulled something out in the second half, it gives us something to play for in Thomond Park.”
Though they opened the scoring with an O’Gara penalty after 10 minutes, Munster spent most of the first-half on the back foot, desperately defending, though some of that defence, as admitted by Foley himself, was just desperate, as the team at times looked at odds with itself. The postponed game against Ulster last week a telling factor, perhaps?
“Yeah, obviously, but if you’re going to allow counter-attacks like we allowed today – I know myself and David Wallace got caught on basic defence around the ruck near our own line. Stuff like that you can’t legislate for, and that was a soft 14 points we gave them. That’s something that’s easily fixed and hopefully we’ll have all those little things right for next week.”
The second-half saw a much improved Munster, even allowing for the fact that Clermont had two players sin-binned in that period. The visitors produced some great backline running and some powerful forward surges.
“We got the pace of the game up to where we like to play. It was a bit stop-start in the first-half, we didn’t have control of the ball while in the second half we got that control, we put a bit of pace into it, and when you have a backline as good as we have, with the likes of Leams (Denis Leamy) and Wally (David Wallace) running onto ball, Marcus powering up the middle, we’re a dangerous outfit once we get the tempo up.”
Such was the danger they created, the visitors could in fact have taken even more from this game. With time running down, the bonus-point looking secure, the ambition in this team was evident in the way they went in search of the equalising try.
“Whether we won today or drew today, we’d still have to win next week, so it was important coming into this game that we got something out of it. The last few minutes we were still going for the win; we got the ten points (start of second half, came within seven), then out on the pitch we were saying we needed to get the next score, we needed to keep the pressure on them and see how they reacted.
“I think we managed to do that, we managed to stay within seven, but you saw at the end the willingness of the boys to have a crack from anywhere to try to get that equalising try and maybe a draw out of the game which at half-time you wouldn’t have thought possible.”
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