It's just a blip, something we can fix, says Rassie Erasmus
The province’s seven-game winning run came to an end on Saturday as the Tigers gained revenge for their Champions Cup humiliation of the previous week at Thomond Park, albeit with a last-minute long-range penalty from Owen Williams to get them over the line.
As both Erasmus and opposing director of rugby Richard Cockerill suggested in the aftermath of what was a good old-fashioned ding-dong of a contest, a successful 50-plus metre kick does not cure Leicester’s ills any more than a miss would have done the same for a victorious Munster.
Yet while this was by no means a vintage show from either side, and Munster failed to reach the heights of intensity, accuracy and attacking verve that marked their previous European wins against both Glasgow and the Tigers, there was enough in terms of fight and spirit to satisfy Erasmus this was a blip rather than a sign of something more serious.
A week on from the 38-0 hiding they administered to a desperately poor Leicester side in Limerick, Munster had travelled to the East Midlands with the belief they could become only the second European side to win at Welford Road in the last decade. Two missed kicks from Tyler Bleyendaal, a failure to capitalise on Manu Tuilagi’s yellow card for a shoulder charge on Rory Scannell and, crucially, a rejuvenated Tigers effort at the breakdown ensured that would not be the case.
For all Munster’s efforts, Bleyendaal kicking them into an early 6-0 lead, then going ahead once more 16-15 thanks to Niall Scannell’s converted 75th-minute try, it was the metronomic boot of Williams that sealed their defeat.
Bleyendaal misses in the 27th minute, with the penalty accrued from Tuilagi’s late hit, and on the stroke of half-time, allowed Leicester to stay in the game, 6-6 at half-time as Williams levelled while the home side were down to 14 men, their intensity in contact yielding indiscipline from the visitors that had been absent seven days earlier.
That would cost them more heavily in the second-half when Williams pushed his team into a 15-9 lead and full-back Simon Zebo was yellow-carded after tackling wing Adam Thompstone without the ball as he threatened to chase down his kick in the 65th minute.
Hooker Scannell’s try 10 minutes later, converted by a slipping Bleyendaal, had an element of smash and grab about it and another ruck misdemeanour as Munster tried to hold on provided Leicester’s lifeline, Williams from inside his own half with the clock on 79:09.
“I don’t think that (the Tuilagi sin-binning) is where we lost the game,” Erasmus said. “We missed two kicks at goal that could have given us a bigger lead. I think more in the end if you look at the last 10 or 15 minutes with us getting a yellow card and then having to guts it out, I thought overall we didn’t deserve to win the match; not just in that spell where they had 14-men.
“I thought it was a great battle. If you put 15 players out there playing their hearts out with intensity, errors are going to happen. I don’t know, did they score a try? (No.) They put pressure on us to give penalties away and they got the points. I can’t fault anybody. We could have won it at the end, we didn’t but it is certainly not something that we can’t fix.”
Despite the defeat, Erasmus bore the look of someone enjoying himself, safe in the knowledge he has his players on the right track just five months into his tenure. What is more, Munster’s hopes of reaching a first quarter-final in three seasons remain in their own hands, the losing bonus point they took home from Leicester keeping them in the Pool 1 mix, two points behind Glasgow with a game in hand as they prepare to next face a Racing 92 side already blasted out of the reckoning.
The rearranged trip to Paris to play the postponed round one game on January 7 precedes a trip to the Warriors and then a round-six home game with Racing, whose priorities will now clearly have shifted back to the Top 14 with European qualification an impossibility. No wonder Erasmus spoke of the Munster squad staying calm as they return to the Pro12 as league leaders for the Christmas derbies against Leinster and Connacht.
“We are realistic about where we are and where we are going, where we are playing as a team. There is still a long season to go. We will lose some games, there is no doubt about it. At the end of the season if you can get to the play-offs in both competitions that would be great.
“I have said it a few times now, it is a team from last year that we are trying to build into a team that becomes formidable but we are still off it. There are three or four players that have come into the squad and some of them are only on loan agreements, we can’t just compare it with last week only, we must compare it with where we went last year in Europe and the pool we are in.
“If you look at the pool it’s decent competition we are playing against. We are disappointed, really disappointed but also realistic.”
G Worth (H Thacker, 78); P Betham (T Brady, 72), J Roberts, M Tuilagi, A Thompstone; O Williams, B Youngs; E Genge (L Mulipola, 61), T Youngs - captain, P Cilliers (G Bateman, 51); E Slater, G Kitchener (M Fitzgerald, 51); L Hamilton, B O’Connor, L McCaffrey (M Williams, 61).
Tuilagi 29-39 mins; T Youngs 75 mins
W Evans, S Harrison.
S Zebo; D Sweetnam, J Taute, R Scannell, K Earls (A Conway, 69); T Bleyendaal, C Murray (D Williams, 72); D Kilcoyne (J Cronin, 50), N Scannell, J Ryan (S Archer, 74); D Ryan, B Holland (J Kleyn, 50); P O’Mahony - captain, T O’Donnell (J O’Donoghue, 63), CJ Stander.
Zebo 66-76 mins
R Marshall, I Keatley.
Pascal Gauzere (France)
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