Marcus Horan: 'With that mix of experience and youth you could have magic on Sunday'

A few years ago the scenario Munster face this weekend without access to frontline players would have exposed the province's production line. Now it appears to underline the progress it has made, albeit still short of where it could be and where Leinster’s is at.

TALKING TACTICS: Academy manager Ian Costello, left, makes a point to Ethan Coughlan during Munster squad training at University of Limerick. Picture: Brendan Moran/Sportsfile

You can’t exactly say Wasps is Munster’s Sheffield Wednesday game.

Covid and South Africa has represented merely a crisis for the club, not a disaster like it knew in the form of Anthony Foley’s still stunningly premature passing or which Manchester United faced in the wake of Munich.

And as the Japanese dictionary shows, crisis can also mean opportunity, a word that has regularly cropped up with Munster having to blood so many young players. United were hardly able to put the same spin on how they had to go about mustering a team to fulfil their first post-Munich fixture, an FA Cup fifth-round game against Wednesday.

Yet there are parallels. The sheer overnight scale of new faces. And the sense of Stand Up and Fight defiance both scenarios triggered within the club and its support base. Whether Munster emerge victorious the way United did that night back in 1958 may be uncertain — for one, they are away whereas United had a packed Old Trafford willing them on to a remarkable 3-0 win — it feels like a long time (five years to be precise) since the public seems as excited and galvanised around one of their matches.

What has added to the excitement is the profile of the new players. How some of them represent a return to the old Munster pathway and others reflect how it has expanded into new territories. A few years ago a scenario like this would have exposed the Munster production line. Now it appears to underline the progress it has made, albeit still short of where it could be and where Leinster’s is at.

There are few with their finger more on the pulse of the game within the province than Marcus Horan. Since finishing up as a player himself, he’s been Munster’s player-development manager, supporting the career and wellbeing of their players, while remaining rooted in the Limerick club scene; though he’s taken a break from coaching, he still serves as a member of Shannon’s rugby committee. While some aspects of how the game is structured within the province annoy and even deflate him, some recent trends and developments excite and energise him.

“I think we’re now seeing a lot more [Munster] lads getting game in the AIL and I think that’s important,” he says. “There seems to be a greater realisation that playing competitive games is crucial in their development.”

It’s not quite a return to the days of Galwey, Clohessy, and even a young Horan, who came from the killing fields of the old AIL. They came from the club game first and then linked up with Munster; today’s player first teams up with the province’s academy and then links up with a club and plays some games for them. But still, it’s better than how it was a few years ago.

Munster’s coaches are increasingly visible at AIL games, not out of tokenism or to generate goodwill with the sport’s roots. They’re there because more academy players are featuring in them. They want more academy players playing in them rather than having splinters on their posterior. They want them becoming more battle-hardened rather than being cosseted in the gym.

“The issue before was that there was a sense that an 18- or 19-year-old were probably not at the required level of strength and conditioning to train and compete with the senior players so they were held back to get in more time in the gym and get bigger and stronger,” says Horan.

“But the schools are now catching up in that department so guys are coming out with a bit more strength and it’s giving players the opportunity to play more [adult] matches.”

A case in point is Patrick Campbell, who’ll debut tomorrow at full back. In recent months he’s gone from Presentation Brothers College into the Munster academy, being blooded in AIL games for his new club Young Munster, where he has been scoring tries at a rate like he used to score goals for an All-Ireland-winning minor Cork football team. It wouldn’t be beyond him to be tomorrow’s Shay Brennan, the teenage United debutant who scored two goals against Sheffield Wednesday that night and was still around a decade later winning a European Cup.

A part of Bobbie O’Dwyer would love if Campbell was still available to Cork football; the manager of that victorious 2019 Cork minor team, he is now over the U20s, and has no doubt if the player had not prioritised rugby he’d already be in with Keith Ricken and the county senior team. Yet O’Dwyer notes and takes pleasure in how transferrable the Nemo Rangers clubman’s football skills are evident in his rugby, just as some of his rugby rubbed off on Cork that season.

“I was in touch with him only the other day and while I haven’t seen him play [rugby] recently, whenever I have seen him play you were struck by his spatial awareness and his ability to see things that bit before they happened,” says O’Dwyer. “In both sports he has very quick hands and the ability to sidestep and leave the ball off at the right time.”

What struck him most about Campbell was his attitude, one tailor-made for the professional game. At the start of that 2019 minor campaign Cork lost to Kerry, but with a backdoor available in those pre-Covid times, they regrouped and identified they had to become a much harder-tackling team. By the time of the All-Ireland final, their tackle count was three times greater than it had been in their opening game. Campbell drove that as much as anyone.

“Patrick’s a very thoughtful athlete, constantly looking at ways he can improve. And he’s a leader. When we zoned in heavily on the performance and statistical analysis, he was one of the first guys all over it. And it wasn’t necessarily about him; it was more about how he could contribute to the team. So he went after the tackle count. And although he was a very good scorer for us from centre forward, he was highly conscious of things like the number of assists he and we had because he wanted to make sure as a forward line was operating as well as it could.”

If Campbell is an example of someone from a traditional source of talent for Munster — Cork, Pres, football — then three other call-ups typify a new trend. Three of tomorrow’s eight replacements — Conor Moloney, Ethan Coughlan, and Tony Butler — were all playing for Ennis RFC U18s only last year. Hurling country has become rugby country, at least in a Clare context.

“Munster get a lot of flack, and rightly so, for certain things, but you have to say they’ve spread the game right through the province,” says Horan. “You now have those Clare lads in, the likes of Thomas Hearn from Waterford, fellas from Kerry. With the emergence of Bandon Grammar and Bandon RC, you have players coming from West Cork which you’d never had before. So I do think it should be highlighted more how the game has spread, both in the number and level of clubs and not just the professional players coming out of it.

“But the thing that has to happen now is to ask, ‘Right, we’ve spread the game to non-traditional areas, but how can we bring the more traditional places back to the level they were?”

Horan’s thinking primarily of Limerick, his adopted home. With the way the last five years have gone, it’s the reverse of Clare: Rugby country has become hurling country. Neil Tracey of RTÉ estimates that Daniel Okeke, another call-up tomorrow after some impressive performances with Young Munster, is the first Limerick forward to make a Munster debut in either European or URC competition in eight years. Back then that would have been unimaginable.

“It tends to be the way in a small region like Limerick where when one sports is doing well, another sport takes a dip,” says Horan.

“And we have to recognise that a system that might be working in Dublin isn’t one we can mirror here. And that comes down to the club game not getting the recognition and support that it deserves.

“Clubs are putting a huge amount into the sport. If you were passing Coonagh [Shannon’s club grounds] on a Saturday morning, you wouldn’t get a parking spot with all the primary school kids that are in there playing. But then they’ll go to secondary school and for five or six years they might just play a few open cup games with the club, and when they leave school, they have little allegiance to their old club. They’ll go back and ask, ‘How much are you going to pay me?’

“I think it’s disgusting. A total kick in the teeth to people who have put so much into a kid only for him to be poached by another Division One team after he leaves school. And I’m not saying that just because I’m from Shannon; a lot of people around Limerick in other clubs feel the same way.

“But it’s systemic. I think it’s fair to say that the schools have huge sway at committee level in Irish rugby and it means there’s not enough alignment between the club and the school game.”

But just as he feels clubs should have far more access to secondary school players — and those same players should have far more access to their clubs — Horan likewise thinks individual schools in the province could be supported more by the branch and the province. It’s begging to happen but even more has to happen. Because again, this is Munster. Not Leinster.

“If you take a school like Ardscoil Rís or Munchin’s, it’s not like a Blackrock College or a St Michael’s in Leinster. Munchin’s facilitate other sports like basketball and GAA. In Ardscoil they’ll put as much into the Harty Cup hurling team than they will into the senior rugby team, if not more.

“Some of the Dublin schools have the budget of a provincial rugby team; that allows them to have a full-time head coach, S&C coach, nutrition, video analysis. I know in my own [former] school of Munchin’s, there isn’t the resources to even pay a coach, let alone S&C.

“But what’s beginning to happen now is that Munster are getting into some schools that will have them and give players programmes and access to expertise.”

Which is why some 19-year-olds are now strong enough for AIL Division One games. And now, because of the circumstances, for them to be given their head in the European Cup.

“Look, Covid is a bitch and it’s taken the fun out of a lot of it because boys just want to play,” says Horan.

“But the core of this team are an incredibly resilient bunch with what they’ve been through, like the Anthony situation. And I can see the likes of Peter O’Mahony and Keith Earls being really energised by this challenge. With that mix of experience and youth you could have magic on Sunday.

“They may not get the result but it could be the launching pad for some guys’ career and even signal a changing of the guard. It could put pressure on lads. And that’s a good thing. You need that level of internal competition.”

Munster have needed that and the recent changes.

Just to get back to where they want to, things will have to change some more.