Bradley buoyant as West’s awake
And he admitted that Friday’s assignment away to Leinster was the farthest thing from his mind yesterday even though Michael Cheika’s side are desperate to avenge their shock defeat to the Westerners early in the campaign.
Bradley was preferring to savour his side’s most recent success: “We’re not too worried about Leinster in the RDS. We’ve turned over Munster who are European champions. They were fantastic last year and three years ago. They’re the standard bearers for Irish rugby.”
Munster meanwhile will be doing a whole lot of soul-searching over the next few days.
But coach Tony McGahan claimed he wasn’t surprised by the defeat as “there have been signs over the past few weeks that we haven’t been putting things together as clinically as we would have liked”.
The Magners League games against Glasgow Warriors, The Scarlets along with the Heineken Cup clashes with Montauban and Clermont Auvergne were among the clashes which caused concern for McGahan.
The Glasgow game was the first at the new Thomond Park and the performance that night was underwhelming. The same could be said of the European matches against Montauban and Clermont with the result that the outstanding performance against Sale Sharks at Edgeley Park is a distant memory.
Some may point to the game against the All Blacks to refute the argument but very few of Munster’s front-line players were involved on that occasion.
Ironically, nothing became Munster more on Sunday than the manner in which they accepted defeat.
Neither captain Mick O’Driscoll nor coach McGahan can have enjoyed leaving the dressing room to speak to the media. But they did so like the good professionals they are, readily accepted that the better side won and were open and honest about their own poor performance.
Connacht officials were quick to remind the assembly that this was in sharp contrast to how Leinster took their beating at the Sportsground last September. On that occasion, none of their coaching staff or players were made available to the press.
Significantly, they again displayed a certain level of touchiness at Ravenhill on Saturday night when refusing to talk to Setanta Sports because of critical remarks made by the station’s pundit Neil Francis after recent Heineken Cup games against Castres.
O’Driscoll and McGahan didn’t pull their punches in accepting how poorly the side had performed against the hosts in Galway. There were no excuses concerning the absence of six front-line players and injuries to others. Indeed, McGahan used adjectives like “appalling” and “lethargic” to describe his side’s display with skipper O’Driscoll accepting that “we didn’t turn up”.
“Connacht’s hunger and something lacking in our performance carried them over the line,” said McGahan. “It wasn’t a lack of effort on our part, more a case of poor execution.
“There was no complacency. That has never been a factor here. We trained well, we knew exactly what we needed to do and exactly what we were facing. When you’re turning over ball in such a manner and kicking as badly as us, it looks like you’re not trying. But we were trying but didn’t execute well.
“We all share the spoils of victory just as we share the spoils of defeat. So we need to cop it, we need to move on and we need to get a bit of sting in our tail.”
Fairly and honestly spoken. And after the manner in which Sale demolished London Wasps by 31-3 in the Premiership at the weekend, everybody directly associated with Munster realises the size of the task awaiting them at Thomond Park on January 16.
If they don’t step up appreciably on recent form, they could well be dumped out of Europe that evening.
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