Patient Williams looks to grab Munster chance

DUNCAN WILLIAMS has suffered more than his share of injuries over the last few seasons but is now ready to challenge all three international scrum-halves for his place on the Munster team.

Having recovered from shoulder and knee ligament operations and from a torn hamstring that kept him sidelined for the bulk of two years in the last four, Williams has learned to be patient.

In his days of anguish, 25-year-old Williams took inspiration from the likes of Fourie du Preez of South Africa, Mike Phillips of Wales and Munster’s own Peter Stringer.

“Obviously you look at all the best scrum-halves around the world and try to take a bit from all of them. Du Preez and Phillips are two of the best around; I’ve watched a good bit of them, I try to see what they’re bringing into the game and I try to bring it in to my game with Munster as well.”

Closer to home, Williams gives a big vote of confidence to Stringer: “Fantastic player,” he says, “with 98 caps for Ireland, 220 or something for Munster, you can’t argue with that; he has been on top for so long and you just have to admire everything about him; the professional attitude and the huge work rate. I hope he goes on to get 100 for Ireland; nobody would begrudge it to him.”

With Conor Murray at the World Cup and Tomás O’Leary injured, Williams is guaranteed more game time in the RaboDirect Pro12 league campaign.

With Stringer, they are the only senior scrum-halves available to Tony McGahan, and Williams admitted: “It’s an opportunity. Hopefully I’ll get a bit of a run. It’s no use playing one game and being out for four or five; you do need to have a run.”

As a replacement against Llanelli last week, Williams made a dramatic impact with his first try for the province, but he played down the significance of the score.

Munster have yet to concede a try and both Stringer and Williams have also benefited from playing behind a dominant pack.

In terms of defence, Williams hailed the contribution of forwards coach Anthony Foley and he admitted it was very satisfying to go through games without yielding to the opposition attack.

“Defence is a major part of our game now and Axel [Foley] has really worked very hard on that aspect. Defence won us a lot of games at the back end of last season and now again at the start of this season it has been significant.”

Williams also had high praise for the Munster pack and particularly the front row players.

“Last week,” said Williams, “the performance from the pack was awesome, and to my mind we have three of the best tighthead props in the country at the moment, with John Hayes, BJ [Botha] and Stephen Archer.

“They’re brilliant players, and we have great looseheads as well in Marcus [Horan] Wian [Du Preez]. Then when Darragh [Hurley] comes back from injury we’ll have three quality players to fill in each position, not to mention Mike Sherry, Denis Fogarty and Damian Varley for the hooking spot.

“The results of a huge amount of hard work are showing.”