McGahan weighs up options

MUNSTER coach Tony McGahan was last night revising his strategy and schedule for the coming week in the wake of another weekend of inactivity for his rugby stars.

Yesterday’s Magners League postponement meant more than half of the selected side will go into Saturday’s Heineken Cup game in Treviso without a match since December 20th in Perpignan. McGahan picked Jean de Villiers ahead of Lifeimi Mafi for the postponed Scarlets game and Niall Ronan in a reshuffled back-row in place of long term injury victim Denis Leamy.

But McGahan cautioned: “It won’t necessarily be the same team because the intention was to look at a number of different combinations, whether they started the game or whether they finished the game. We had scenarios in our heads to look at different players both in the forwards and backs at different points in the game. That has been taken away from us without any ability to make a final decision based on playing time. So we’ll go back and look at those selections.”

The weather has seriously dented Marcus Horan’s prospects of any involvement in the game and Jerry Flannery has been more or less ruled out of the equation.

“We’ll have to play that by ear through the week”, said McGahan. “Marcus is more advanced than Jerry and we were hoping he’d play 60 minutes for Shannon last week and 80 minutes this week. But, unfortunately, those two games were called off and left him devoid of any game time. Whether Marcus comes back into the selection mix, we’ll have to monitor him and see. Indeed, that’s the case with other front rowers as well because Julien (Brugnaut) has been out for a couple of weeks and Darragh Hurley and Dave Ryan are also still out so we’re a little thin

although Stephen Archer and David Kilcoyne are available.

“Marcus hasn’t played since the last Treviso game and that’s 11 weeks ago and I suppose for a front rower to come back after such a long break away from home against a side that generally sends out a whole new front-row on the fifty minute mark would be asking a lot.”

Although McGahan clearly won’t find it easy to omit Lifeimi Mafi for such an important game given his rich contribution to the team’s cause over the past few weeks, it now looks a near certainty Jean de Villiers will start the Treviso game in the centre alongside Keith Earls.

And it will also be revealed shortly whether the Springbok will be part of the Munster set-up next season. He arrived here on a one-season contract last October with an option for two more.

“We’ll be sitting down in the next couple of weeks and looking where Jean and where Munster would like to go in the next couple of years”, said McGahan. “We usually look at all the contracts in the February-March period with the intention of getting all of that concluded as soon as possible.”

The Aussie recognises the next couple of matches will define his team’s season and accepts that they face a serious test against the Italians on Saturday next, their preparations in no way helped by the current weather conditions.

“Treviso will be game fit and are coming off some good results in the Heineken Cup and in their local competition”, he said.

“We’ll be okay organisation-wise. The biggest concern for us is getting the contact work into play. I don’t have a lot of concern for those who have been playing for a fair bit but look at someone like Paul O’Connell, he has played only two matches in the last seven weeks. This week is huge for us as next week, the preparation should be okay because of who it is and where it is. We’re looking at synthetic pitches outdoors and trying to get as much done as we can. So long as it’s sunny, we can run around on the synthetic so we’re not confined to a space or stuck indoors.”