Murray: It’s just a stadium

It’s five years and a handful of weeks since former Leicester Tigers coach Pat Howard sat on a battered old sofa in the club’s training grounds and described Thomond Park as “just a field” to a scrum of English and Irish journalists.

It wasn’t meant as an incendiary device.

There was none of the trademark cockiness with which we have come to expect from Howard’s fellow Australians. It was merely a statement of fact ahead of what proved to be their historic visit to Limerick later in the week.