We are all in this together, urges Anthony Foley

Munster head coach Anthony Foley was advising staff, players, and public alike in UL yesterday that it will take a concerted effort by all concerned if the team’s morale and well-being are to be restored after a bitterly disappointing run of bad results.

Foley is fully aware that his harshest critics are levelling the blame for a record-equalling five successive defeats firmly at his door, but stressed the need for collective responsibility.

“It’s everyone that wins, everyone that loses,” he stressed after a no-holds barred meeting of the squad. “It’s now about us trying to build pressure on the opposition. A big issue at the moment for us is our inability to score. We need to try and make life a little bit easier for ourselves and try and get that scoreboard ticking over.”

Munster will hardly do that if they continue to miss simple penalty shots at goal and persistently turn over possession in the opposition redzone. Foley maintains as philosophical a public front as possible as these shortcomings recur with alarming regularity from week to week, although there was still no concealing his frustration.

“Tyler (Bleyendaal) missed a penalty against Dragons, Keats (Ian Keatley) missed one against Leicester, and Rory (Scannell) missed one against Leinster,” Foley said.

“There is no hiding away from the fact that we need to be getting those three points. That builds the scoreboard up. But they step up and miss them and we have got to then get back into the game somehow.

“We have a kicking coach in Ian Costello who has been doing it for a long number of years now. It is not just his first run at it. A number of weeks ago Dave Alred was in for a day with all of our kickers. We have done all of that. It’s a small little thing that needs fixing and some of that is down to confidence. Hopefully we can rectify that.”

Foley accepts without apparent complaint captain CJ Stander’s decision to kick for the corner rather than for goal when readily available penalty points are on offer — as was the case on three notable occasions against Leinster.

“I thought for a left-footed kicker (Scannell) on the left-hand side of the pitch with the wind the way it was swirling, it was going to be a difficult kick anyway,” said Foley. “As a player, I would have backed our maul unless the out-half told me otherwise. To go into the corner, we get the lineout, we get another penalty from a maul.

“We go to the corner again and from there we don’t get our maul up and going. But we get some forward power on top of that and we get some pressure on their line and we get turned over. They are the gambles you take.

“We had a 22-year-old kicker playing in a massive game for him. It was a difficult kick, particularly after missing the one in the first half.”

Foley also spoke of the frustration suffered by captain Stander at the handling of Sunday’s game by Ulster referee David Wilkinson. There was a definite feeling that Mike Sherry should have been awarded a try and that Leinster prop Marty Moore should have been punished for “putting Andrew Conway spinning in the air”.

“CJ was getting very emotional around a lot of what was going on that was clear and obvious but wasn’t being looked at. He has got to manage that. I thought Dave managed him quite well at the weekend. And I thought Leinster talked to the referee very well and reffed the game quite nicely.”