Foley’s mind only on Reds job
Other than BJ Botha, Donncha O’Callaghan and CJ Stander, few of the Munster side will be well known outside the province. In contrast, Fisher, the recent past Munster forwards coach, has included British & Irish Lions Billy Twelvetrees, Richard Hibbard and James Hook; current English internationals Jonny May and Ben Morgan; Scottish scrum-half Greig Laidlaw and John Afoa, the New Zealand prop signed during the close season from Ulster.
Foley, however, refuses to concern himself with Gloucester, preferring to concentrate on his squad, safe in the knowledge that in three to five weeks, he will be in a position to field whatever side he wishes.
“We have a lot of young bucks ready to go,” he said.
“We want to find out where we are in terms of preparation for the season ahead and a good indicator would be Kingsholm. These games are all about being selfish, about seeing our group of players, where we are with the new stuff we are trying. It’s all about questions that need answering and, hopefully, we’ll get a few answers this week.
“Playing games is the true test of where we are. There are a lot of players not available but one man’s loss is another man’s gain and this is a massive game for a lot of young guys.
“They have trained really well, some are going into week eight, unfortunately some are only going into week four, so we have to manage the squad to the best of our ability to get through the two pre-season games before the league start against Edinburgh.
“We’ve got two English teams in our group in Europe and now we have two in pre-season. They do play a different kind of rugby in terms of the size of their forwards. Gloucester would have been criticised last year about the work of their tight five but we played them three times and it was always a good forward tussle. We fronted up well against them.
“I’ll be renewing acquaintance with two old mates over there, Laurie Fisher and David Humphreys. It’s great to see Laurie back over at this side of the world, he did a great job when he was here with us and he did a great job when he went back down with the Brumbies.
“Humps going over there, it will be interesting to see what direction they take. Gloucester is a club with a lot of passion and obviously we have a lot of history with them in Europe and there’s a great relationship between the two clubs.”
R Cook; C Sharples, H Trinder, B Twelvetrees (capt), J May; J Hook, G Laidlaw; D Murphy, R Hibbard, J Afoa, T Savage, J Hudson, S Kalamafoni, M Kvesic, B Morgan.
Replacements: Y Thomas, D Dawidiuk, S Knight; E Stooke, T Palmer, J Rowan, R Moriarty, C Braley, A Thomas; S Monahan, M Atkinson, T Isaacs, H Purdy, S McColl.
S Fitzgerald; R O’Mahony, C Bohane, I Dineen, D Sweetnam; J Holland, D Williams; A Cotter, G Slattery, BJ Botha, D O’Callaghan (capt), S McCarthy. S Buckley, B O’Mahony, CJ Stander.
Replacements: N Horan, K O’Byrne, J Ryan, J Madigan, R Murphy, C Sheridan, D Johnston, N Hodson, R Scannell, R Foley, G O’Shea.
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