James Cronin and David Kilcoyne out to show Joe Schmidt the error of his ways

Although never publicly expressed, there was an undoubted sense of grievance in the Munster camp that none of their front-row players merited a place in Joe Schmidt’s World Cup squad.

Leinster props Cian Healy, Mike Ross, Jack McGrath and Tadhg Furlong along with Connacht’s Nathan White all got the call from Schmidt leaving David Kilcoyne and James Cronin out in the cold.

Now both have the opportunity to show Schmidt the error of his ways beginning with Saturday’s Guinness Pro 12 top of the table clash against high flying Connacht.

You wouldn’t expect Cronin to criticise any opponent although he has an interesting way of looking at things.

“Well, they always say scrum is king and it is”, he declared. “Set-piece is massive, line-out, scrum. That is where games are won and lost nowadays. If you have a good platform to work off, it’s half the battle.

“There’s an international squad getting together at Christmas but you can’t look too far ahead. I’m going ok at the moment but that is all it is.

“You are only one injury away from not playing. I found that out last season so it’s keeping the head down and going one game at a time.

“There is good competition. Myself and Killer (Dave Kilcoyne), Johnny Ryan, BJ (Botha), John Ryan over on the other side, Mario (Sagario), so we are all fighting tooth and nail for the same cause.

“You are disappointed if you are on the bench, but you know if that is your role, you come on with 20 or 30 minutes to go and make an impact.” It isn’t often that a clash of Munster and Connacht captures the public imagination but the near certainty is that there will be a record Thomond Park gathering for a meeting of the sides on Saturday considering the heroics of Pat Lam’s squad over the first three months of the season. Not as Cronin admits they ever got anything easy from Connacht in the first place!

“They are in brilliant form at the moment, but even when they haven’t been going so well they will have a big game against Munster regardless.

“They are top of the table and will be coming down looking for a scalp, so we will prepare as best we can. Pat Lam has done a brilliant job with them. They wouldn’t be top of the table otherwise. We have a big task in front of at Thomond Park we will be trying to maintain our own home record. In pre-season we got a bit of a walloping off them and that is still hurting us a tiny bit. I have played them a couple of times over the years and it’s always physical, one score encounters. We know what is in front of us.” The postponement of last week’s game against Stade Francais threw the Munster squad’s preparation out of kilter although they seem to have regrouped without any noticeable difficulty.

“Obviously, Heineken (Champions Cup) Cup over in France, everyone was looking forward to it,” he said. “We found out the same way ye did, on Twitter on Tuesday night, that it was off. There is disappointment, but look it’s small scale compared to what happened in Paris. It’s a game at the end of the day. We had the weekend off and you can see everyone bouncing around today. Everyone is just looking forward to a good inter-pro. I can’t wait for Saturday. We trained on Thursday and everyone knew we had the weekend off. Fellas went away to hotels and chilled out. Mostly, I watched the rugby, so I didn’t get too far away from anything. The S&C sent out a new schedule on Tuesday night, so the minute we found out the game was called off it was re-jigged and everyone knew what they were up to Wednesday.”