Donncha: Toulouse still hurting
O’Callaghan was a member of the Munster side which won the European Cup in the 2008 decider, when the province edged out the French giants, and he and his team-mates are aware that Toulouse feel they have a score to settle after that three-point defeat in the Millennium Stadium.
“We’d be aware of the hurt that defeat caused them,” said O’Callaghan.
“Guy Noves, the Toulouse coach, has been referring to that Heineken Cup final in the run-up to this weekend, and how disappointing the loss was for them.
“They’re one of the biggest clubs in the world, so obviously they approach every game they play with confidence, a Heineken Cup final even more so. On that occasion we did enough to get over the line for the win, even though the game has changed a lot even in the few years since then.”
Munster’s history with Toulouse goes back even further than 2008. One of the most significant games in the Irish province’s development was an encounter with the French side in blistering heat in Bordeaux back in 2000, when Munster won 31-25, a victory seen as a turning point in their fortunes on the continent.
O’Callaghan acknowledges that at the time he and his colleagues would have seen their French opponents as being far ahead in terms of preparation.
“There was a bit of the ‘faraway hills are green’, and we learned that day and on other days that those teams were beatable.
“But their preparation and the culture would have been ahead of where we were. At the time they were. We needed the likes of John Langford and Jim Williams to come in and show us how to be professional.
“It was a learning curve for everybody, and when Jim came in he told us, ‘look, this is what’s required’.
“Jim would come in earlier to stretch before we began, he went for a rub long before we started going for massages. He’d have asked us what we were doing for our muscle tissue, and the attitude we’d have had that time was that a fella was a bit of a shaper getting a rub all the time.
“But Jim was right, and he didn’t get soft tissue injuries because he looked after that for himself. And that was another lesson for us, that you had to take ownership of it and not just put it on the team physio or masseur.”
O’Callaghan himself is one of the longest-serving players in the Munster squad, but he says he has no intention of retiring. Recently he passed Ronan O’Gara as Munster’s most-capped player with 241 provincial appearances, but the big second row says his “drive and hunger are through the roof”.
“A big thing was made of passing ROG on Munster caps, but that felt like a carriage clock. A curtain call. That’s not where I am.
“My drive and hunger is through the roof and my desire... I love Munster and success with the team is everything. I want that success again, badly, because I’ve had a taste of it in the past with the team and I know what it takes to get there.
“People were saying to me, ‘you’ve been a great servant’, and without being harsh, people saying that don’t know me. They don’t know what really drives me.
“I know they don’t mean it in a negative way necessarily, but a person who makes that comment is someone who’s driving me to an extra rep in the gym: it’s about ‘I’ll show them’.
“I’d hate to be seen as ungrateful, because I’m not, but I feel I have loads more in me.
“I’d have no problem putting my hand up at some point in the future to come to say I was delusional that time, but right now I don’t feel like that at all.
“I’ll do everything I can to drive it on and to play for Munster.”
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