Munster in limbo as European Cup fears grow

The travelling party spent more than nine hours at Cape Town international airport having been refused permission to depart South Africa

 

Munster Rugby remain on the ground in Cape Town following a confirmed Covid-19 case in their ranks but plans for their next steps remain up in the air on a number of levels.

Their two-week tour to South Africa to play the Bulls and the Lions on successive weekends in the United Rugby Championship has been in disarray since Thursday night when news of a new variant of the Covid-19 coronavirus emerged and the UK became the first country to impose a travel ban on a number of southern African countries.

URC organisers had little option but to postpone the two rounds of its competition due to be played in Pretoria, Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town over the fortnight but with other jurisdictions following the UK’s lead and those flights out of South Africa not cancelled as a result already booked solid, getting Munster, Cardiff Blues, Scarlets and Zebre Parma out of the country on a charter flight and finding a destination to accept it was the next hurdle.

Thankfully, Scarlets and Zebre took off from Cape Town on Sunday, but plans for both Munster and Cardiff Blues to join them on the same charter were abandoned when PCR testing revealed one positive result in the Irish camp and two among the Welsh party. It is not yet clear whether the Munster confirmed case is the new Omicron variant but a statement from the Cardiff club said: “As a consequence of one of these results suspected of being Omicron, the entire travelling party have returned to their hotel to isolate."

Munster should have been recovering from their eagerly-anticipated clash with the Bulls at Loftus Versfeld in Johann van Graan’s hometown of Pretoria but having left the city in the wake of the postponements the travelling party instead spent more than nine hours at Cape Town international airport having been refused permission to depart.

They were waiting for guidance from local health authorities on when they would be allowed to return to their hotel.

The priority for van Graan’s squad and management was staying virus-free until they are cleared to travel back to Ireland and they are set to keep isolating until further rounds of PCR testing allows them to do so, with a spokesperson telling the Irish Examiner the province’s course of action was “the best way to deal with the situation, taking every precaution possible for the health of everyone.” 

Their postponed URC games will be rescheduled, most likely on the championship’s fallow weekends during the Six Nations in February and March, but publicly there is little appetite to discuss what happens next. However, as the Irish Examiner reported on Saturday, the clock is ticking on their next scheduled match, a Heineken Champions Cup pool opener at Wasps in Coventry on December 12.

European Professional Club Rugby (EPCR), organisers of both the Champions Cup and Challenge Cup, are understandably keeping a careful eye on developments, with Cardiff set to welcome reigning champions Toulouse to the Arms Park on December 11 and Scarlets due to travel to Bath on the same day. Zebre Parma are scheduled to host French side Biarritz in the Challenge Cup, also on December 11.

“EPCR are in contact with Munster and monitoring the situation,” a competition spokesperson told the Irish Examiner on Sunday but it is understood van Graan is not concerned about an inability to field a team to face the English side, even though he and the rest of the South Africa-bound group may be forced into further isolation on their return to Ireland.

A number of Ireland internationals — Tadhg Beirne, Joey Carbery, Andrew Conway, Keith Earls, Dave Kilcoyne, Conor and captain Peter O’Mahony — as well as South African star Damian De Allende, were given a week off after their Test exertions and are still in Ireland having abandoned plans to join the squad in Pretoria over the weekend once the shutters came down on travel to South Africa. 

There are also academy players still training at the province’s High Performance Centre in Limerick and though those two cohorts would be unable to mix with the returning bubble of players, there is every confidence Munster would be able to field a team in Coventry on December 12. 

“Absolutely,” said the Munster spokesperson, “that’s the reality. Of course we could get a team together but the key for now is to get out of the airport, get to the hotel and into our rooms, isolate and then take the next steps from there, what we’re advised to do.” 

Just as the Irish province is currently dealing with the here and now and are reliant on the say-so of South African authorities for permission to leave, EPCR’s priority in an ever-changing situation is to maintain the integrity of their competitions. They will be unable to come up with a definitive plan for the weekend after next until it becomes clear what both Munster and Cardiff’s travel and potential quarantine scenarios are and the impact that has on both sides’ match preparations and general fitness to compete, let alone what their respective jurisdictions allow them to do.

What is certain, however, is that unlike the URC and its fellow domestic leagues the English Premiership and French Top 14, which set out downtime during Test windows and therefore gave themselves wiggle room to rearrange fixtures, there is no such capacity in the EPCR schedules. And if Omicron proliferates across Europe, we could be back to the scenario the competition faced last season when rounds three and four of the pool stages were cancelled having awarded 28-0 victories in round two to clubs whose opponents had been unable to field a team due to Covid cases.

It promises to be a long winter for the rugby authorities.