Would you say Johann van Graan and his coaching team have progressed Munster (and the project) to the point where those ambitions are attainable?

Van Graan has done a very underrated job as Munster’s head coach. His time in charge has coincided with the rise of Leinster in the era of peak Saracens dominating Europe for five or six years. When a coach is on the losing end of multiple semi-finals - especially to a local rival - it’s easy to paint him as being a guy who can’t get his team over the line. When you add in last season’s failure to qualify from the pool stages of the Champions Cup, that painting gets a little bigger. 

If you look at the young players Van Graan has promoted over the last two seasons and his willingness to bring in big outside voices like Larkham and Rowntree, he deserves a lot of credit for building a squad that looks to be capable of challenging in the post-Saracens era.

Who or what is the most exciting prospect in/about Munster Rugby for 2021?

The youth. Full stop. It’s hard to pick out just one and that’s the point. It’s taken a few years to sort out but Munster have finally managed to get a chain of succession going in a few key positions. It isn’t at the scale of Leinster quite yet but players like Craig Casey, Ben Healy, Fineen Wycherley and Gavin Coombes are ready to be big players for Munster right now, and that’s before you get to the guys waiting to make that step up. 

In the post-Covid world, the ability to produce the vast majority of your starting squad in-house AND have them at a level to compete with the very best of their peers will be worth its weight in gold. When you look at the last two or three seasons at U20 level, a lot of the Grand Slam-winning teams have had a strong Munster core. 

France have started to reap the benefit of that at test level, it’s time for Munster to do the same. 

Of the up-and-coming prospects, who would you most like to see given his chance and allowed to develop, even if it means short-term frustration?

Alex Kendellan. This backrow looks like the real deal and could be a guy with the ability to go through the levels extremely quickly. I’ve seen him play a few times for Pres and he always looked a level above most of the guys he tangled with. He’s captained sides at underage and looks to have the physicality you need to stand out quickly at a professional level. They won’t rush him - look how good Gavin Coombes looks in his second season as a professional to get an idea of the value of “readiness” - and he needs a bit of luck with injury as all players do but I really believe that he’s got everything he needs to be a top player sooner rather than later. 

In terms of Munster's all-important identity, are you happy that the best traditions of the province are being utilised - or is it time to put all that SUAF stuff to bed and find a different mojo?

Identity is a weird thing. Sometimes you only know it by its absence. I really believe that the identity of any rugby club is its fans, and the club must be a mirror to what its fans want. 

The easiest identity of all is ‘we win trophies’ but, as we know, it isn’t always possible to win. If your identity is based on always winning, the fans won’t like what they see when the club does not win. I think that was Munster in the early to mid-2010s as the general fanbase came to terms with Munster not being the side that was perennially challenging for top-end silverware. 

Remember the days when Munster would win a Celtic League and it would be seen as an afterthought if it wasn’t followed with a Heineken Cup? That was Munster’s identity as much as it was about ‘the parish’, the Fields and ‘Ireland by Birth, Munster by the Grace of God’. In 2020, I think Munster are in a good place after the difficult 2010s. The first major crowd at Thomond Park for a big home game or Interpro will be the tester. If a youthful Munster side can start frightening the life out of a big English or French team in front of a packed Thomond Park, Thomond Park will respond in kind. If they start beating these big sides, the journey will begin again and, when you think about it, that has always been Munster’s real identity. A shared journey from being Undesirables to Undeniables. 

What is the key barrier to Munster taking the next step and competing consistently again with Europe's elite?

The treatment table remains Munster’s greatest obstacle. Signing Damian de Allende and RG Snyman were significant coups recognised as such around the world, the final pieces in the jigsaw to finally elevate the province back onto club rugby’s top table. So, to lose Snyman to a serious knee injury after just seven minutes of his debut in August was a massive blow. Van Graan has offered hope that the giant lock could be back on the field for the tail end of the season and having got a brief glimpse of his set-piece prowess, the prospect of Snyman’s re-introduction will be keenly anticipated. Ditto Carbery. Kilcoyne’s absence is also a major loss, for Ireland as much as Munster, and the ball-carrying threat he can bring would bolster any team. No club goes a season without maybe one or two such losses but Munster are missing three key components from line-up that could potentially contend regularly in Europe. 

Would you say Johann van Graan and his coaching team have progressed Munster (and the project) to the point where those ambitions are attainable?

Much done with a lot more to be achieved before Munster can dine at the top table. The lockdown period appears to have been used productively, on and off the field. On the evidence presented since the start of this season, it appears Graham Rowntree has had a positive impact on Munster’s scrum while their line out maul is back to where it was in the days of O’Connell, O’Callaghan and Hayes.

Stephen Larkham is now over a year into his tenure and his impact is more recognisable. It helps that he’s had so much time with the emerging players and it would appear that Craig Casey and Ben Healy have benefitted majorly from this. One hopes that the next layer in Jack Crowley, Liam Coombes and Sean French will reap similar rewards down the track.

Van Graan deserves a lot of credit for seizing this claustrophobic period and turning it into a positive. He has facilitated and encouraged a lot more integration between the academy, the emerging professionals like Gavin Coombes who has been sensational lately, and the senior players. There is a new leadership group within the squad and everyone is benefiting. That’s there for all to see in the Pro14 games to date with the body language of the players exuding positivity. 
Getting the mood and culture right in the dressing room is crucial to success. How many times do you scan through the squads available to some of the French clubs, Montpellier being a classic case in point, and wonder why they are so far down the league table. Despite the depth of quality in any squad, the chemistry in the dressing room has to be right if you want to be successful. The Munster management appear to have the mix just right on that front and with more time to make the subtle technical and tactical adjustments, Munster look in a good place right now.

With Saracens no longer competing in the Champions Cup, a big obstacle to Munster’s ambitions in recent times has been removed. Time will tell if they are good enough to avail of that but the evidence suggests that the players and management are on the right track. That said, this period of Champions Cup pool action will tell us a lot.

 Of the up-and-coming prospects, who would you most like to see given his chance and allowed to develop, even if it means short term frustration?

As a former second row, I am really keen to see how Munster handle the development of Thomas Ahern. Munster just don’t produce too many 6’ 9” specimens with the range of skills and athletic ability the big Waterford man has to offer. 
The fact that he played much of his underage rugby in the backs means he is more than comfortable standing in the wide channels, is composed in traffic and in making decisions whether to pass out the back, off load or carry into contact.

Given that skillset, he has the perfect mentor at hand in Snyman. The Springbok World Cup winner is a bit of a freak of nature, blessed with amazing pace for such a big man, has brilliant hands but also a hard edge and a grounding in the traditions of Springbok forward play. In the circumstances, I can’t think of a better tutor for Ahern to learn from. He could also learn a thing or two by picking Billy Holland’s brain when it comes to structuring and calling line outs. 

Ahern is in the infancy of what promises to be an outstanding career but at 22, the time has come to invest in his future by giving him more regular exposure. While he has a way to travel, he is such a unique talent he needs more exposure having scored on his competitive debut in the big win over Zebre recently. Once he matures physically, he has the capacity to become an integral part of the Munster front five for the next decade.

Of the up-and-coming prospects, who would you most like to see given his chance and allowed to develop, even if it means short term frustration?

I'm sure the vast majority of people would say Craig Casey. That's understandable, given how impressive he has been. But I don't think there's any doubt that Craig is going to play a large amount of rugby this year and get plenty of opportunities to grow into the number 9 jersey. Others are not so sure of having that chance when the international boys come back. For that reason, I would focus on some others.

First is Thomas Ahern. We haven't seen much of Ahern in the first couple of months of the season and he only made his first start in red against Zebre due to a forced change on the day of the game. He is quite the specimen, standing at 6' 9”, but doesn't suffer with the lack of mass that affects many particularly tall European second rows. He is incredibly dynamic for such a big man - great in the air, very quick, and a terrific off-loader that you don't see too often in second rows. He reminds me of a young Richie Gray, who changed people's perception of what a second row can be expected to do with ball in hand when he broke onto the scene. 

Munster haven’t been producing second rows in the last few years at the rate they were previously. In particular, there has been a glaring lack of lineout callers in the ranks. Billy Holland's contract is up at the end of this year and if he wants to continue, he will be afforded the opportunity to do so. Even at that, whenever Billy finishes up, there will be a huge hole in the lineout department at Munster. This issue has not been helped by the fact that the second rows Munster have signed in recent years, while of a very high calibre (RG Snyman, Tadhg Beirne, Jean Kleyn), have not been natural lineout callers. Munster need to be proactive about fixing this and getting Thomas Ahern as much game time as possible this year is one way of doing it.

Additionally, John Hodnett has been excellent any time he has played. Comparisons have been made with Sean O'Brien and I can understand why - he is aggressive, powerful and brilliant at playing the ball through contact. The backrow will always be the most crowded place for a youngster to try and muscle his way in, but both John and Gavin Coombes have shown enough promise to expect plenty of opportunity this year. 

In terms of Munster's all-important identity, are you happy that the best traditions of the province are being utilised - or is it time to put all that SUAF stuff to bed and find a different mojo?

I am a bit conflicted about this. Munster has an aura. We grow up watching the club in the belief that it is something special, something unique. Those of us lucky enough to make the dream of pulling on the red jersey a reality is fully convinced of the fact that it is a special, unique club to play for. And it is. There was no better illustration of this for me than going to play for Grenoble, a team that was up and down, turned over about half its squad every season, and had very few local guys playing regularly for the senior side. It was a fantastic place to play, a club that had a very proud culture and genuinely could not have done any more to make it feel like a home, but a very different place without a doubt.

Munster is different, but it's also the same as everywhere else, and becoming increasingly so. The identity and tradition of the club is rooted in it being full of local lads, with a few exceptions. That's what we had in the glory period of the noughties and is the foundation on which Munster as a rugby institution is built. That's not really the case anymore, at least certainly not to the same extent. There's nothing wrong with that - it's inevitable in professional rugby unless you have a production line like that of Leinster, and they don't really exist anywhere else these days. 

When your identity is predicated on the prevalence of local players, however, it's hard to argue that this development doesn't dilute it by a certain amount, and we shouldn't kid ourselves into thinking it's the same as it was back in 2008.

Failing to retain both local players and staff has an impact here. While we will now always rely on signings from elsewhere to ensure the squad is as strong as it can be, certain decisions have been questionable, and guys capable of playing at the highest level moved on unnecessarily, in my opinion. Dave O'Callaghan is a prime example of this. Someone who had proven he was capable of playing at the highest level of European rugby over the years. Bad luck with injury, of course, but his credentials were there for all to see. He was phased out in favour of Arno Botha, a good player but not someone that provided anything Dave couldn’t. Dave moved to the beautiful Pays du Basque and is now an indispensable part of a Biarritz side battling for promotion to the Top 14. I doubt he has any regrets about his decision to leave. If Munster are serious about keeping their identity as strong as it can be in the era of ruthless professionalism, this kind of thing needs to be avoided.

Would you say Johann van Graan and his coaching team have progressed Munster (and the project) to the point where those ambitions are attainable?

This might be van Graan’s third year, but it still amazes me that Munster have had five different head coaches in the last ten years. That’s five head coaches with potentially five different visions of where Munster were going, how they should play, what type of player should be recruited and what players should be retained or cut from the squad. Add to that changes at CEO and assistant coach level and you begin to see the level of change that Munster have gone through in the last decade. That level of change is never good for any organisation.

Of the up and coming prospects, who would you most like to see given his chance and allowed to develop, even if it means short term frustration?

In terms of Munster's all-important identity, are you happy that the best traditions of the province are being utilised - or is it time to put all that SUAF stuff to bed and find a different mojo?

Munster’s historical identity was founded on the basis of players and fans, temporarily leaving aside club allegiances and uniting under a provincial banner. However, professionalism, academy development of players and IRFU strategy have all combined to de-prioritise the club game to the point where now it plays a relatively minor role in the Irish rugby pathway, leaving Munster to be more of its own unique identity rather than the collective we have historically known.

In the noughties the media focused on the wider social appeal of rugby in the province (especially in Limerick) and comparisons with GAA structures, along with on-field success helped to draw in the casual fans but the 2010’s saw the decline of the club game and the lack of on field success for Munster occurred in parallel which created the question marks around the provinces identity.

I also don’t buy the idea that because a team has always played a certain style that they should continue to play that style forever. You need to be able to tailor your game plan to match the attributes and skills of the team. Playing a game tactically that doesn’t suit your players seems to be a pretty quick way for a coach to get his P45. On-field success is the be-all-and-end-all of professional sport and traditionalism generally takes a back seat.