McGahan’s Magners fixation

DOWN the line, Munster’s Amlin Challenge Cup game against Brive might be regarded as the next highlight of the season. Except it’s not, and neither is the upcoming ‘battle of Ireland’ with Leinster. At least not for now, according to Tony McGahan.

Munster’s coach has his eyes firmly set on Cardiff Blues tomorrow night when Munster seek to address problems they have had on the road in Wales these last few seasons. It’s not a bad record, just not a particularly good one and McGahan wants the leaders to address that.

His 29-man squad includes Ireland’s returning internationals, although it’s likely that only Paul O’Connell of those who started against England last weekend, will feature from the start of this one.

However, he does have at his disposal Ronan O’Gara, Peter Stringer and, of course, Denis Leamy, all of whom came on as substitutes in Dublin. By some distance, it is the strongest squad at McGahan’s disposal for weeks.

Just as well, given that Cardiff will boast their best side in the same period and McGahan expects it to be a difficult assignment.

“We have a 10-week programme ahead of us, hopefully, and we’ll start that with Cardiff this week.

“We’ve got a Magners League campaign and the players that have been here during the Six Nations break have worked extremely hard to keep us in contention with regards to that, so that is our major focal point at this stage.”

It is the start of a testing run but McGahan hopes it will bring out the best in his squad.

“It is better to have a tough schedule. If you are looking at the top sides and where they are and the draw that each side has in its path on the way home, we certainly have the most difficult draw.

“We have Cardiff, the Scarlets and the Ospreys away from home, with Leinster at home, and a very much-improved Connacht side in the last game of the season. Certainly you want to get a strong measure of where we are and those sides will provide that for us. If you’re going into finals you want to make sure that you have a hard run home and we’ve certainly been provided with that.”

There will be no further fall-out from international rugby and McGahan is relieved at last to have access to all but his injured players (Jerry Flannery, Ian Dowling, Barry Murphy, Tom Gleeson, Denis Hurley and Dave Ryan).

“That’s certainly a strong consideration with regard to game time. We’re in week 40 next week, we’re in week 39 of the season since it started and in most of those weeks there was certainly some sort of compromise with regards to the programme.

“From here on in, things are really under our control with regards to players and we’ve been lucky enough to get a few injured players back in the last couple of weeks which gives us a fairly full complement to pick from,” he said.

MUNSTER squad (v Cardiff): S Deasy, F Jones, K Earls, D Howlett, L Mafi, S Tuitupou, J Murphy, C Murray, P Stringer, R O’Gara, D Cusack, W du Preez, M Horan, T Buckley, S Archer, J Hayes, D Varley, M Sherry, D Fogarty, D Ryan, P O’Connell, M O’Driscoll, D O’Callaghan, D Leamy, N Ronan, J Coughlan, P O’Mahony, T O’Donnell, D Wallace.