Kidney shows he has steel to make tough decisions

THE cynics and the knockers said Declan Kidney hadn’t the guts or the inclination to drop Ronan O’Gara. But yesterday he proved them wrong, just as he did back in the spring of 2006. Very few saw it coming when he dropped Peter Stringer and Shaun Payne from the Munster team to play Gloucester in a Heineken Cup quarter-final at Kingsholm.

Instead, he preferred Tomas O’Leary and Denis Hurley, Munster won, the two new boys starred and Kidney’s reputation as a man of steel and a good judge of a given situation soared ever higher. Stringer and O’Gara had been pupils of Kidney’s from their earliest days at PBC and he had coached them on the rugby field to such effect that both became indispensable members of a long succession of Munster and Ireland teams.

Neither would have been dropped by Kidney unless he believed he had the soundest reasons for doing so. And now the coach has to sweat it out until Saturday afternoon to see if he has got it right this time as he did on that other notable occasion two and a half years ago.