The greatest game in Heineken Cup history?
To add irony to injury, Munster had been undone that day by a sub-plot swirling around a sacked Ireland coach.
Back then, on the last April weekend of 2004, Warren Gatland felt a burning sense of injustice at his dismissal by the kingmakers of the Irish Rugby Union. Lawrence Dallaglio, never slow to turn any slight into a motivational force, worked his Wasps team into such a lather that their dressing-room door needed some urgent carpentry work.
Certainly by then the agitated Wasps were fit to burst. “You could say they were pretty fired up,” Gatland said within an hour of his team clinching their place in the final at Twickenham the following month against Toulouse. “They didn’t need to open the dressing-room door. They were going to go right through it.”
Back then Munster were the best team not to have won the Heineken Cup. They had been beaten in two finals and robbed of a third against Stade Francais at Lille in between. Now, as the Red Army converged on the capital by land, sea and air from near and far, they stood on the verge of another final.
Who knows, they probably would have got there had Ronan O’Gara not torn a hamstring before half-time but, by the end of the greatest match I ever saw, Munster had also discovered another fact of rugby life. Hell hath no fury like a Wasps team scorned by Ireland’s dismissal of Gatland.
Dallaglio, aware that the Dublin mission would be viewed by the New Zealander as far more than just another match, gave chapter and verse in his autobiography on the subject of Gatland’s ‘ditching’ by Ireland.
“What was the story over there?” Dallaglio asked him before flying across the Irish Sea.
“Look mate, you don’t need to know. Suffice to say, I want to f****** win this game.”
Dallaglio then ‘let it be known’ to the rest of the team what winning would mean to Gatland and what an opportunity it presented to the players to repay the faith the Kiwi had invested in them. It was always going to be a humdinger but long before the end it had touched peaks of excellence and nerve-wracking drama which set it apart, an epic in a class of its very own.
Wasps, seven points clear at one stage, were floored by two converted Munster tries in three minutes, the first from Anthony Foley, the second from Jim Williams. Suddenly, the English champions were ten points down and up against a rampant Munster being willed every step of the way by 47,000 fans, among them the province’s most famous footballing son, Roy Keane.
Far from capitulating, Wasps bounced off the ropes and came fighting back. In doing so they seized the old Munster war cry and turned it to their own advantage, showing that to the brave men from an industrial estate in the back end of High Wycombe nothing was impossible.
“If ever there was a time to stand up and be counted,” Dallaglio said after the match. “That was it.”
What they achieved in the final moments of that monumental Anglo-Irish duel stemmed from an unshakeable inner belief in their ability to climb out of the deepest hole. An Alex King penalty and Tom Voyce’s converted try tied the score at 32-32 with extra-time inevitable.
Any normal team would have been very grateful to settle for that. Only the Wasps of Gatland, Dallaglio and Shaun Edwards would go for broke in a way which brought them the winner from, of all people, the roly-poly Trevor Leota.
A little earlier in that season the Polynesian hooker’s weight had ballooned to 21 stone which made him look like the Square Man, as broad as he was tall. Wasps were so concerned that they hired a minder and placed him on a round-the-clock watch to ensure he kept on the club’s strict burger-free diet. Munster had coped with four Wasps tries but Leota’s almost subterranean passage into the corner came so late they had no time to do anything about it as the visitors won 37-32. Back in the visitors’ dressing-room, Dallaglio and Gatland embraced.
Later, long after Clement Poitrenaud’s faux pas had allowed Rob Howley to steal the final from under the noses of a superior Toulouse, Dallaglio found the words to articulate how he felt straight after the 69-point classic at Lansdowne Road.
” ‘Gats,’ you left Ireland with dignity,” he wrote. “You got sacked, it was unfair but you didn’t moan about it. You went away, considered your options and picked a f****** good one, frankly, in Wasps. You came to us and you made it work. Now you’ve returned to Dublin and without saying a word, you’ve made your point. You’ve told them everything you needed to tell them, which was that they made the wrong decision. But their loss, mate, was our gain’.” And the match wasn’t bad either…
MUNSTER: C Cullen; J Kelly, M Mullins, R Henderson, S Payne; R O’Gara (replaced by J Holland, 29 minutes), P Stringer; M Horan, F Sheahan, J Hayes; D O’Callaghan, P O’Connell; J Williams, capt., S Keogh (A Horgan, 77), A Foley.
Yellow cards: O’Callaghan (63), Henderson (72).
Tries: Foley, Williams. Conversions: Holland 2. Penalties: O’Gara 3, Holland 3.
WASPS: M van Gisbergen; J Lewsey (A Erinle, 77), F Waters, S Abbott, T Voyce; A King, R Howley (P Richards, 79); C Dowd, T Leota, W Green; S Shaw, R Birkett; J Worsley, P Volley, L Dallaglio, capt.
Yellow cards: Worsley 34, Waters 51. Tries: Lewsey, Volley, Voyce, van Gisbergen, Leota. Conversions: King 3. Penalties: King 2.
Referee: N Williams (Wales).
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