Getting down to business

IT has all the makings of another Munster European thriller, this evening’s final Heineken Cup Pool 1 clash with Northampton Saints, but this is a time when drama should be the last thing Tony McGahan’s side could do with.

The mix is a potent one, with Northampton still wounded from that night at Thomond Park when Ronan O’Gara’s drop-kick after 41 phases committed a grievous act of floodlit robbery. It haunted the Saints for the next two rounds and sealed their European fate before the Christmas trees had gone up.

Back in business now, Jim Mallinder’s side are on a roll, storming back up the English Premiership and gunning for an Amlin Challenge Cup quarter-final spot that victory in front of a sold-out crowd at stadiumMK will secure.

Emotions are running high in the Saints camp right now over another issue, with England wing Chris Ashton’s decision to quit Franklin’s Gardens at the end of the season and head to Saracens. It exposed a further wound, irking Mallinder and resulting in the former League star being dropped for tonight’s game.

And into the middle of it all march Munster, with their name already in the hat for the last eight with a game to spare after winning their first five outings. It is all a bit disorienting when you consider the last-gasp feats we have come to expect from the province at the tail end of the group stages.

There is still pressure on Munster, of course, as they chase a victory which would help them secure that most valuable asset, a home quarter-final, seen as essential to securing eventual, trophy-winning success. And as McGahan’s players seek that, would they not prefer, for once, to leave all the fraught emotion to the opposition, while they get on with the business at hand?

Northampton have coped with the absence of Ashton before, most recently during his four-week ban for hair-pulling and they still have a formidable pack despite the injury absence of Ashton’s England cohorts Courtney Lawes and Tom Wood. But throw in a heady night of high tension and raw emotion for the home side and Munster should be sniffing an upset.

They should be. But for all the great strides made by Paul O’Connell and his forwards in set-piece play, the province is still short of a complete performance that will have the Heineken Cup front-runners Leinster, European giants Toulouse and English titleholders Saracens quaking in their boots.

Last weekend’s 26-10 defeat of Castres at Thomond Park may have given Munster their largest margin of victory of the campaign but the scoreline masked a deeply frustrating display riddled with unforced errors, butchered tries and poor decision-making. Another run like that this evening and the Munster management will be dusting off the passports in April and preparing for another away day in the quarter-finals rather than relishing their defence of Fortress Thomond.

“Yeah, we’d want to get better,” McGahan said in anticipation of tonight’s match. “We need to make sure we step up a few gears.”

Northampton have the cutting edge Munster are lacking right now and their defence is every bit as solid as the Irishmen’s since they emerged from their post-O’Gara fog. They are even beginning to look like the side that reached last season’s final and turned the turbochargers on in that first half against Leinster.

A repeat of that is beyond them but they will be looking to derail Munster’s ambitions of a sixth win out of six in any way they can.

In many ways, though, Munster have been shown the way to defeat Mallinder’s side, which trailed Scarlets at half-time last week and then saw the Welsh region fritter away several try-scoring chances as they laid siege to the Northampton line. The first half, though, saw the Saints struggle to find their rhythm, not just through their own indiscipline but by a superb Scarlets defensive performance.

Scarlets’ line speed showed the Saints’ much-revered attacking play can be unsettled, forcing them to rush their game and, with, that commit errors. Yet Scarlets let Northampton off the hook and were left as heartbroken as the Saints had felt at Thomond Park when they squandered a terrific, sustained late assault on the visitors’ line in Llanelli and saw Saints break out through a Ben Foden intercept inside his own five-metre line and score a killer try for a 28-17 victory.

Munster cannot afford a similar outcome if they wish to secure a home draw on Sunday night. They must either find that cutting edge or revert to plan A, the thing they do best: rely on O’Gara to get them field position and use their rejuvenated set-piece to get them over the line.

No drama, just get the balance right. Munster’s European future will depend on it.