‘Back into the fire’

After a difficult season with Ireland, Peter Stringer is ‘chomping at the bit’ to get back on the pitch for Munster’s quarter-final with Gloucester tomorrow, he tells Edward Newman.

THESE are the days Peter Stringer lives for — the knock-out Heineken Cup match, the red letter days when Munster grapple with their own European destiny and, if they manage to get on a roll, generate the capacity to mobilise an entire province to march behind them. It’s the period in Munster’s season, post-Six Nations, when, as he puts it, they’re “straight back into the fire”.

And it’s better than been left out in the cold as his Six Nations campaign proved. Since 2000, Stringer had been centre stage in a green shirt, but his international career appears to be on hold since losing his place or, as some rightly argue, made a scapegoat after the Georgia match at the World Cup. He didn’t sulk when he was dropped, and hasn’t since.