Bradley hits out at Irish snub for Connacht players

MICHAEL BRADLEY had some advice for his one-time mentor Declan Kidney in the aftermath of last night’s Magners League victory for his Connacht side over Munster at the Galway Sportsground.

Understandably emotional and fired up after his team’s magnificent and well-merited result, Bradley unequivocally declared: “Connacht do crave involvement at international level and it’s disheartening for us that we don’t have enough recognition for what our players do.

“Ireland need to change things in terms of the personnel when they compete at international level because the same people are going all the time.

“We had a number of the Ireland back-up players up against us today and they were well beaten. The guys who sparked for them (Munster) can’t play for Ireland.

“The questions are there for other people to answer but certainly our guys put their hands up today and backed up the Leinster result, so it’s up to other people to run with it and give our players a chance at a higher level.

“An awful lot of what we strive to do is about respect and you need to beat the best to get respect. I think we did that today in beating Munster.”

Hardly surprisingly, the former Munster scrum-half finds it difficult to explain why Connacht can deal successfully with the European champions and Leinster and then suffer defeats by embarrassing margins against supposedly lesser opposition.

“It’s a complex question,” he agreed. “I know we’ve lost twice in the Magners but the performances have been excellent. I think the players respond very well to the crowd. It was a full house and it was a privilege to play in front of them. We did something similar against Leinster and it makes a big difference.”

Asked what it meant to him personally, Bradley responded: “There’s one very specific reason why I’m delighted. I played 22 years ago in the last match between these sides which Connacht won — and of course I was playing for Munster! But that monkey is off my back now.”

The expression on Tony McGahan’s face told its own story where the Munster coach were concerned.

“I thought we got everything we deserved,” he readily admitted. “We were lethargic and our individual skills levels were appalling in certain situations. We needed to dig in and show some grit and be able to get ourselves through it when we weren’t playing well and we weren’t able to do that. We failed with field position, we failed with poor kicking and we failed with our line-up.

“There have been signs over the past three weeks that we haven’t been putting things together as clinically as we would have liked and you can only go to the well so many times and we’ve done that over the last three weeks. But this evening we certainly got what we deserved.

“I thought the Connacht performance was excellent. They showed tremendous patience with the ball and a huge commitment to defence. They came with an intent to get a result and they certainly did that.”