Guts and glory game is back
And when you do simple things well, as Munster did at the Aviva Stadium on Saturday night, good things happen.
A first win over Leinster in Dublin since September 2008 and with it a significant morale boost heading into the European fray in two weeks were the rewards for this Pro12 victory over the reigning champions, which moves Munster into the top four and relegates their old foes to sixth place, the lowest of the Irish provinces.
The manner of the win will have been even more pleasing to those supporters who for the past two seasons, had become anxious with their heroes’ struggle to get to their heads around the wide-wide game advocated by previous coach Rob Penney and pined for something, well, a little more narrow-minded.
After two defeats at Thomond Park under the new stewardship of Anthony Foley, who had pledged to restore the traditional Munster game plan that had delivered two Heineken Cups, the struggle had been the inability to revert to that old-school type.
Their old Kiwi mentor’s admirable, occasionally effective yet ultimately ill-suited philosophy was still apparently ingrained in the players’ thought processes and exhibited like a case of sporting Tourette’s with sporadic, poorly-timed outbursts of expansive rugby. In Dublin on Saturday, five games into the Foley era, the Penney has finally been dropped. Yes, it’s a terrible pun recycled far too often but for once it fits after a performance of breakdown dominance, set-piece efficiency and ruthless finishing that had Munster three tries to the good and 21 points ahead by half-time.
“It’s not about what I think Munster should be doing,” Foley said when asked if he had felt frustrated by the rugby introduced by his predecessor. “You do what you are good at. You don’t try and reinvent yourself to something you are not good at.
“Now, at times we were very good at the wide, wide Canterbury-style game and we got to two European Cup semi-finals and the knockouts of the Rabo. There is a lot to be said about that.”
Yet, he implied, common sense had finally prevailed at the Aviva.
“At times out there we did what we were good at. Other times we got caught. You can’t fault the enthusiasm of the players; their mentality on the kick chase, their tackles, their attention to detail. Their appetite for work was frightening at times. We go away looking into Scarlets next and know there is something to work on.”
Wide for wide’s sake was replaced by a welcome clarity in Munster’s decision-making that still saw wings Simon Zebo and Andrew Conway put to good use but only when the time was right, as prop James Cronin and No.8 Robin Copeland muscled their way over the line instead.
Fly-half Ian Keatley delivered the coup de grace three minutes before the break, intercepting a reverse pass from opposite number Jimmy Gopperth on the visitors’ 10-metre line and racing under the posts, his conversion giving Munster a 28-9 interval lead that had scarcely seemed imaginable before kick-off.
The Munster forwards ruled the roost, blowing their Leinster counterparts away in collision after collision, ruck after ruck, much to Leinster head coach Matt O’Connor’s annoyance, the Australian muttering darkly about Welsh referee Ian Davies’ failure to punish the Reds for repeatedly killing the ball.
That all rang a little hollow, though, after a second half that saw four Munster players sin-binned, reducing the visitors to 13 men for one eight-minute spell during which Darragh Fanning grabbed Leinster’s only touchdown. A penalty try followed after referee Davies pounced on a collapsed maul and saw Dave Foley follow Damien Varley and BJ Botha into the bin but Leinster were narrowing the gap without ever really threatening to close it.
“Our close quarter defence wasn’t good enough,” O’Connor said as he surveyed the wreckage of a third defeat in five games.
“I think our execution on the big moments hasn’t been good enough. We did a couple of good things but we let ourselves down across the course of it, and that’s probably without the ball and that’s with our execution, in the broader sense. So, tighten up those and it’s not the end of the world.”
That might be easier said then done when Leinster are missing quality players and leaders of the calibre of Sean O’Brien and Cian Healy for the foreseeable future. O’Connor admitted that with a challenging trip next weekend to Zebre, then their Champions Cup opener against Wasps, his players will need to make a “significant” improvement on the level of performance shown against Munster.
“We’ll have to be better,” the Leinster boss said as he looked ahead to Wasps, while of his team’s position in the Pro12, he added: “It leaves us a little bit off the pace, doesn’t it? You haven’t got too many games to lose if you’re talking about top two, so from that end we’ve got to get our house in order pretty quickly.”
Foley naturally had every reason to be the happier coach, particularly as his A team also beat Leinster at Donnybrook on Saturday afternoon. Yet he too recognises his team still has big improvements to make. Nor, though, did he accept the perception that Munster had got off to a miserable start with two wins out of the first four games.
“We lost two games,” he said. “With September we were being judged on two games that were televised and not the four games we played. We played quite well in the Treviso and Zebre games. I’m not sure many people saw them. We’re going in a manner we are liking. There will be things to work on. That’s not a problem to us. We’ll go away and dust it down. We have a good month’s training, good preparation, looked at a lot of players.
“We got two wins up in Dublin today that we will take and go home. We’ve got to make sure we’re prepared for Scarlets in six days. I think the ‘A’ boys play Moseley on Saturday. Again we have to tog our 45 and have them prepared for that.”
Not much time for celebration. Munster keeping the heads down and their shoulders to the wheel.
I Madigan; F McFadden (M McGrath, 14) G D’Arcy, B Macken (R Kearney, 47), D Fanning; J Gopperth, E Reddan (I Boss, 45-53 & 62); M Bent, S Cronin (B Byrne, 65), M Ross (T Furlong, 44; E Byrne for Furlong, 50); D Toner, M McCarthy (K Douglas, 50); R Ruddock, D Ryan (J Conan, 74), J Heaslip (c).
F Jones (c); A Conway (G van den Heever, 49), A Smith, D Hurley, S Zebo; I Keatley (JJ Hanrahan, 68), C Murray; J Cronin (D Kilcoyne, 50), D Casey (D Varley, 38), S Archer (BJ Botha, 50); D Foley, P O’Connell; CJ Stander (S Archer 68-71; B Holland, 80), T O’Donnell, R Copeland (P O’Mahony, 62).
Varley (57-67), Botha (61-71), Foley (70-80), Murray (79).
D Williams.
Ian Davies (Wales)
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