Building of a red powerhouse
It was a game that saw Keith Wood, Will Carling and company pay avisit to a raucous Thomond Park in search of a home quarter-final draw and leave Limerick on the end of a 23-16 defeat that effectively ended their Heineken Cup hopes.
October 12, 1997. Not really that long ago. Bertie Ahern had been Taoiseach for four months, Gaybo was still at the helm of the Late Late Show, Gerry Ryan was yabbering away on the radio as usual and the good times were just around the corner in the fast-approaching new millennium.
Yet rugby was just emerging, blinking, dazed and confused, from an old world of blazered amateurism and gingerly dipping its toes into a new world of professional sport.
It was on that dreary October afternoon in Thomond Park that the two worlds seemed to collide, when an essentially professional Harlequins side, captained by Keith Wood and including icons Will Carling, Jason Leonard, Laurent Cabannes and Thierry Lacroix, arrived from London looking to roll over a Munster outfit still coming to terms with the seismic shift the game was undergoing.
The Munster bandwagon that would sweep across Europe during the 2000s was not yet rolling and the previous season’s Heineken Cup had seen the Reds put to the sword by Toulouse, 60-19. A first away win in the fledgling competition would not come until the following season, in Padova, Italy, and Harlequins landed in Limerick to face a home side rooted to the bottom of Pool D with just one win from five games. Beaten by Cardiff in Musgrave Park – some things haven’t changed — Munster had then lost in Bourgoin on the same weekend that Quins suffered their first defeat in the Pool, a 32-31 reverse at The Stoop to Cardiff. Yet progress to a home Heineken Cup quarter-final was within reach and a jaunt across the water to play the bottom club in the final group game pointed to the task being a formality, particularly as Quins had completed a 48-40 win over Munster four weeks earlier, a game in which Ronan O’Gara made his European debut.
A glance at the brief player resumés in the matchday programme tells you all you need to know about both the state of the game as it stumbled haphazardly into professionalism and also the huge divergence in rugby cultures on either side of the Irish Sea. Back then the London club had embraced the pro game sufficiently to count “rugby player” 17 times under the occupation category on its squad list, compared to seven on the Munster panel. The other occupations are also revealing as Quins arrived in Limerick with a bond trader, broker, advertising executive as well as a couple of financial advisers. Carling’s occupation is listed as “managing director”. Tulsen Tollet, an Australian league international who had switched codes to union that season, made his Harlequins debut off the bench at Thomond, replacing the injured Carling at half time.
“We had a good team,” Tollett said. “Woody, Will, Thierry Lacroix, Laurent Cabannes, it was pretty decent.”
Munster had a company director of its own at the time, one Peter Clohessy, while starting fly-half Killian Keane is listed as a treasury manager but substitute O’Gara was one of 10 students in the squad that day. As Daren O’Leary remembers it, the Harlequins players were probably aware of all that information and then some having been thoroughly briefed on Munster by their exiled hooker and captain. “One of the things that stood out about the Thomond Park game was that we had an advantage with our skipper being Keith Wood and you didn’t play against Munster without getting a full rundown on every individual, the club and just about every supporter in Munster as well before we turned up,” recalled O’Leary, one of two Harlequins try scorers in Limerick. I don’t think I foresaw what sort of powerhouse in Europe they would become, but you certainly knew what a powerhouse in Irish rugby they were.”
Former England A wing O’Leary, now a rugby agent with Top Marque Sports, the stable that counts Simon Zebo and Conor Murray amongst its clients, said that for all Wood’s inside knowledge nothing could have prepared his players for the Thomond Park experience as 8,000 Munster fans crammed themselves into the old stadium to provide quite the reception for the visitors.
“Absolutely, 100%. It was a culture shock getting there and actually seeing that many supporters. It was our first year of professionalism and we weren’t used to crowds like that. In modern-day terms it wasn’t that big a crowd but at the time, in Thomond Park as it was, it was a hell of an atmosphere. It just seemed to be that everybody who lived nearby had come to the ground that day and it reminded me of the sort of fevered atmosphere of a Kingsholm, only on a much larger scale.
“It started really, from arriving on the coach through crowds of red shirts and it was the first time I felt that a game was a real occasion for the whole place, not just a match that kicked off at 3pm.”
This one kicked off at 4:30pm, Harlequins scoring first, Lacroix kicking a penalty — “my first experience of the total silence for the goalkickers, which was eerier than fans booing or chanting,” said O’Leary.
Killian Keane levelled off the tee but then Harlequins seized the initiative, O’Leary getting on the end of a well-executed example of the London club’s famed running rugby. Yet Munster had home pride on the line and were not prepared to present themselves as cannon fodder for their English visitors. The hits piled up, Kiwi wing Rhys Ellison’s on Wood a particular crowd pleaser while Munster captain Mick Galwey rattled Carling’s ribcage to the extent the England centre did not reappear for the second-half.
By that stage, Ellison and Eddie Halvey had got over the line for tries converted by Keane to put the home side 17-8 up, only for full-back Jamie Williams to claim a soft try to keep Quins in touch at half-time, 17-13.
“We were having a really good season and at half-time it felt that everything was going to plan. We’d had this crazy game against them at home with about 15 tries scored but now everything felt good.”
It got better when Lacroix narrowed the gap to a point just after the restart. But then it all started going awry for the visitors with the Munster back row of Halvey, Alan Quinlan and Anthony Foley in rampaging form to unsettle the cosmopolitan London side and Keane slotting two penalties to send Thomond into delirium.
“We were still in the game at half-time and we possibly felt that we had dispelled the Munster myth a little bit. But we just weren’t in the game second-half and the crowd had a lot to do with that feeling,” O’Leary said.
“We were in a good position at half-time and yet the crowd made us feel as if we were down and out. That was an incredible experience in my first European season, to see and feel that level of fevered support. We might have beaten them at home but Munster were a completely different animal in Thomond Park. And, having played that second-half, I’m not surprised by what Munster did in Europe.”
For their troubles, Harlequins suffered a double whammy, not only missing out on a home quarter-final but drawing Toulouse away, where they would get a 51-10 hammering from the inaugural champions.
Munster’s season had finished with that famous Thomond Park victory as players returned to do battle for their clubs, the AIL still king, but not for much longer. All of which made the Munster effort in that last game of the province’s campaign, with qualification for the knockout stages already beyond them, something of a puzzle to the Harlequins players.
Tollett, for one, was shocked by the turnaround from the first game at the Stoop.
“I watched that first game in the stands and I was looking at Munster and thinking the away game wouldn’t be too bad,” said Tollett, who now lives in Galway and is a sports presenter on BBC World.
“But it was like a completely different Munster team at The Stoop to the one which played at Thomond Park and it was only about six weeks later, if that. It wasn’t an insurmountable deficit at half-time but the atmosphere at Thomond Park was completely different to anywhere else in rugby, very parochial and the one thing I like about Munster people is that they’d heckle players and come out with some great one-liners but they’re also very genuine and nice people when they speak to you after. Just genuine people who enjoyed watching rugby.
“It was disappointing to lose but it was also actually an eye-opener into Irish rugby, given what I’ve seen since over the years. From that it was clear to see that when they played at home they were a completely different team to the one that played away. It probably wasn’t until a couple of years later when they played Northampton in the final that they actually learned how to play away from home.
“There wasn’t a great difference in terms of personnel between their team that played at the Stoop but that day in Thomond against us they showed a completely different attitude.”
MUNSTER: D Crotty, J Lacey, R Ellison, M Lynch, J Kelly, K Keane, B O’Meara; I Murray, M McDermott, P Clohessy, M Galwey (capt), S Leahy, A Foley, A Quinlan, E Halvey.
NEC HARLEQUINS: J Williams, D O’Leary, W Carling, J Ngauamo, L Belligoi, T Lacroix, H Harries; M Cuttitta, K Wood (capt), J Leonard, G Llewellyn, L Gross, R Jenkins, L Cabannes, B Davison.
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