Munster and Varley to be right for Toulouse

Munster hooker Damien Varley is confident his injured foot — and indeed Munster’s all round game — will be just fine when the province welcomes European giants Toulouse to Thomond Park for Saturday’s Heineken Cup quarter-final showdown.

Varley, currently managing a painful foot condition called plantar fascitis, fell prey to the problem during the second half of Munster’s 22-18 league defeat by Leinster at the Aviva Stadium last Saturday night and, like his team’s less than fluent performance, he believes normal service will be resumed against the four-time Heineken Cup champions in Limerick this weekend.

Of his troublesome foot, Varley said: “I just got a bit of a twinge on it. Precautionary reasons [for being substituted] really. We’ll reassess it early on in the week and hopefully everything will be fine.”

The same applies for Munster’s performance levels as head coach Rob Penney’s squad had to continue to shake off the rust brought about from two months of relative inactivity against a Leinster side for the most part battle-hardened from their time together in the Six Nations.

Munster’s own Six Nations winners had to be re-integrated to the provincial set-up, although only three of the Ireland quartet made it to half-time after skipper Peter O’Mahony withdrew just before kick-off with a hamstring issue.

Varley assumed the captaincy and Munster took a 12-3 lead after 30 minutes, only for cracks to then appear. Leinster took over, moving into the lead with the only try of the game through Brian O’Driscoll on 57 minutes, Munster having been reduced to 14 men three minutes earlier when Dave Kilcoyne was sin-binned by Alain Rolland.

“It just has to be parked, that’s part of the game, unfortunately,” Varley said. “It’s a tough one to take, losing to Leinster up here again. We’ll take the positives out of it and we’ll look at some of the mistakes we made. We’ll park them and move on ahead of another huge game next week.

“Obviously it’s a different kettle of fish facing Toulouse next week. We’ll have to study it a lot over the next few days, it will take an awful lot more intensity and work-rate to win next week.”

In that regard, Varley believes playing a high-intensity derby was the ideal preparation.

“There’s no better test in terms of preparing for next week than the game that happened. I wouldn’t worry too much, we got a good run-out, probably got rid of a few cobwebs.”

One further frustration for Munster in addition to their inability to score a try was a sense of injustice for the second week running that dominance in the scrum was not rewarded by the referee.

“We’d look at our set-piece and how dominant we were,” Varley said. “For us to get a guy sin-binned later on in the game for not rolling away in a ruck, I think one or two of their players should have been sin-binned early on in the game for constantly collapsing the scrum.”

Welsh official Nigel Owens will be in charge this weekend but the Munster hooker added: “I don’t think we’ll change anything. I think we are happy with what we are doing, there’s probably an onus on referees to really understand what’s happening and they need to reward a dominant pack moreso.”