‘I think it was a moment of realisation for a lot of us that we were a really good team’
It was a season that saw Munster ranked 66-1 Heineken Cup outsiders and treated with such disdain by Saracens that John Kelly remembers his team running out at Vicarage Road to the theme tune of American 60s ghoulish sitcom ‘The Munsters’.
Yet the 1999-2000 campaign was anything but horrific, marking the province’s big breakthrough as a European contender. And in a season of so many milestones, today marks the 20th anniversary of Munster’s first quarter-final victory, a 27-10 Thomond Park win over Stade Francais.
Declan Kidney’s side had already ticked some boxes in 99-00, notching their first win in England, at Saracens, followed by a similar milestone in France knocking over the previous season’s runners-up Colomiers in Toulouse. They would go on to beat Toulouse in an epic semi-final encounter in Bordeaux to reach the final. That 9-8 defeat to Northampton at Twickenham would be a disappointing end to a landmark campaign but the journey will live long in the memory.
Former Munster wing Kelly had been an ever-present in that run to the final and was not alone among Kidney’s squad that season to identify the arrivals of Ireland and Lions star Keith Wood and Wallaby lock John Langford as bringing serious impetus to the team and its mindset.
Wood, back at Munster on a season-long loan from Harlequins had laid down a marker at a pre-season squad meeting at which the players had been asked to set attainable targets for the campaign. Wood, to the surprise of many in that room, made winning the Heineken Cup a serious goal.
Kelly, then 25, recalled a September team meeting in Belfast before an interprovincial clash with Ulster. Langford, newly arrived from the Brumbies having been capped by Australia, made a big impression.
“John Langford was huge,” Kelly told the Irish Examiner. “There’s no doubt having somebody like Keith Wood coming into your team really gave us a boost.
“And John Langford gave us a lot of belief. He was a very experienced guy, a very practical guy, a good leader.”
“He came to us and I remember being up in the Europa Hotel and we had a team meeting before the game. We hadn’t won up there for 19 years and John Langford said something along the lines of we were the best team he’d ever played in. I think as Irish people, certainly back in those days in rugby, we would have had a massive inferiority complex and actually believed in it. If we won big games it was always about us catching a team or being the underdog.
“When he came in and said that to us, I think it stuck with us, at least it stuck with me anyway, that team meeting. I think it was a moment of realisation for a lot of us that we were a really good team.”
That belief would carry Munster a long way, the subsequent 25-24 win at Ulster the first of many milestones, all against expectation.
“That year we went to Saracens and they treated us as a joke,” Kelly continued. “They played the theme to ‘The Munsters’ TV show as we ran out onto the pitch so we were seen as absolute nobodies.”
With Langford and Wood adding to the experience of captain Mick Galwey, an otherwise youthful Munster swept the 1999 interpros that autumn, beat a World Cup-bound Ireland XV at Musgrave Park and would go unbeaten through the first five rounds of the Heineken Cup pool stage to progress to the quarters.
“We played that year, unbelievable rugby,” Wood said recently of that campaign on “Off The Ball”. “It was a great blend of forwards and backs, kind of guys running all over the place and some of the scores were truly amazing.”
Pontypridd were beaten 32-10 in round one, followed by a dramatic 35-34 win over Sarries in Watford which sealed that first victory on English soil.
Colomiers were downed a week later for the first win by an Irish province on French soil and then came the home game with Saracens with a first home quarter-final the objective. It was another one-point nerve-jangler, the English side, with South Africa’s World Cup-winning captain Francois Pienaar leading the charge and Mark Mapletoft grabbing a try three minutes from time to give the visitors a 30-24 lead.
As O’Gara wrote in his 2008 autobiography: “Gaillimh gathered us behind the posts and told us we were going to march down the field and score a try. Simple as that. No panic. And that’s what we did.”
A Langford lineout win and Wood try left O’Gara for the match-winning conversion, 31-30 and Kidney’s team were through with a game to spare.
And so to the quarter-final against a Stade Francais side Kidney would compare to treble-winning Manchester United.
Stade arrived in Limerick with a big reputation, Argentina fly-half Diego Dominguez pulling their strings from fly-half. Yet the Munster bandwagon was up and running, on and off the pitch, the old Thomond Park was a 13,400 sell-out and confidence was high.
While the head coach had talked up the opposition in public, the squad’s inferiority complex had begun to diminish. Munster were outsiders no more.
“We had claimed big wins in the pool,” Kelly said, Saracens had had superstars in their team, Francois Pienaar, Richard Hill, massive players and we had beaten them over there, which really rocked them, and beaten them at home as well and we had belief in ourselves and our squad.”
Kelly’s back-three partners Anthony Horgan and full-back Dominic Crotty gave Munster the ideal platform with early tries, Horgan opening the scoring after just four minutes and O’Gara’s conversion of Crotty’s try pushing the home side into a 12-0 lead after just nine before Dominguez’s long-range penalty just before the interval made it 12-3 at half-time.
Yet Munster did not blink and O’Gara’s boot made Stade pay for second-half indiscipline, the low point of which was a yellow card for centre Cliff Mytton for throwing a punch.
“They were another team of superstars and I was up against a French winger, Christophe Dominici,” Kelly said, “and at one stage I remember he got me in a tackle and landed me right on my head which you’d be sent off for these days but in those days it was seen as a good tackle.
“We’d been playing really well but it was tight enough until they got a man put in the bin and Mick Galwey just turned around to us and said ‘now’s the time to turn the screw and make them pay’. So we just ramped it up again and they were blown out of the water then, they just disappeared. We really pulled away from that point and like a lot of French teams of that era, when things started to go against them you knew they’d disappear.”
O’Gara’s five second-half penalties ensured Munster were home and hosed and into a first Heineken Cup semi-final.
“That was probably the first time we played against Stade and we got them a good few times over the following years,” Kelly said.
“There are some teams you’d play against like Toulouse and even Leicester where you actually had a good relationship with the team and the organisation off the pitch but then there were teams like Saracens and Neath/Ospreys and Stade Francais which we had a terrible relationship with, both on and off the pitch, which we genuinely didn’t like. We beat them that time but it was the start of a really bad relationship!”
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