Fear factor a driving force for Munster

PAUL O’CONNELL has been a talismanic figure for Munster almost since the day he first broke into the side back in 2001.

Over the intervening eight years, he has been central to many great performances and memorable occasions but there is now a body of opinion that in the 37-14 rout of Sale Sharks last week, the side gave its most clinical display yet in Europe.

As captain of the team and man of the match, O’Connell might be expected to join in the eulogies that have flown since the demolition of the Sharks. But he’s a modest man and prefers to let others do the talking on the subject.

“I don’t know, I don’t know”, he mused yesterday. “It was a very good performance. Sale were very confident coming into the game, they had been playing really well in the English Premiership and were obviously a club side with a massive budget and a big host of stars … so for us to score six tries against them, albeit with a small bit of luck at times, was great.

“It was one of our best games in a while but it’s hard to say if it was one of the best ever. It was an unusual game in the last ten or 15 minutes. We got a few soft tries and it seems to me that we never get soft tries, that we have to work very hard for them, and so they were very welcome.

“If you look at some of our work around the fringes, we would have been delighted with it. So many of the things we were working on came off — we got the ball to the wing quickly and took the spaces there where their defence was a bit soft — we got it out there way over the gain line for the forwards to run on to was great and it’s really what you aspire to.

“When you’re around the ruck, you’re looking to get over the gain line to soften it for the backs. When they go wide, they’re looking to be over the gain line for us running on to the ball. It’s as simple as that. That’s what happened time and time again. Wally (David Wallace) and Leams (Denis Leamy) were able to punch holes for us and it really worked well.”

If there was a negative, it was the ongoing number of penalties the team has been conceding in almost every match. O’Connell doesn’t close his eyes to the reality of the situation, accepting that four or five against Sale were silly. “You don’t need to give them away if you’re clever and it’s something we need to eradicate from our game,” he admitted.

Furthermore, any feeling of complacency in the Munster camp ahead of tomorrow’s clash with Montauban would surely be dispelled by thinking back to the first meeting of the sides at Thomond Park last October. They got out of jail, scraping home 19-17, but O’Connell claimed: “Close nights like that are all part of the process of getting to where we are at the moment and figuring out what we are good at and figuring what we need to do. A few close calls on those nights probably helped us find our direction as a team and what we needed to do. It was a very bad evening and we really needed to take things on first and foremost. While we would always try to do that, there are specific ways to do it and we’ve got better at doing it in the last few weeks.”

Montauban may be out of the reckoning for a Heineken Cup quarter-final place but there seems to be a genuine feeling in the Munster camp that they aren’t the kind of side that will lie down like one or two other French clubs have done rather notably in the past.

“They’ll be ready for us”, he warned. “They didn’t have the strongest team out against Clermont last week. They have a good record at home winning their last two games against Bayonne and Biarritz. I was talking to Mike Prendergast (a member of the Munster squad who has played in the French League) about when he was in Bourgoin … they’re two different teams, the team that plays at home and the team that plays away.

“It’s their last game in the Heineken Cup, the European champions are in town and we have no doubt about the level of motivation they’ll have for the game. So we have to make sure we are mentally right.”

There might have been a time when Munster teams felt a little intimidated at taking on French teams on their home ground — before anybody takes me to task, they did lose 60-19 to Toulouse back in 1997 and also went down quite heavily to Perpignan and Bourgoin in the following two years before finally making the big breakthrough in Colomiers in 2000. Since then, there have been many great Munster days both in Paris and in the south of the country and going there now seems to bring out the best in the side.

“Being away from home has galvanised this team”, says O’Connell. “I look back on some of our best days with Munster and it has always been about winning away from home, tough places to go to, voracious pockets of the crowd wearing red jerseys, they’ve always been good places. The whole thing that was there in the Declan (Kidney) era, to win in France, has gone a little, but we’ll treat this game for what it is, a massive opportunity to give ourselves a home draw so that the supporters won’t have to dig too deeply into their pockets.

“There’s always fear going away from home. You look at the top-class players Montauban have in their team, they play very clever rugby as we saw that day in Thomond Park, they were so clever in everything they did against us. That little bit of fear will always be there but sometimes that’s what makes you perform as well.”