'It can’t be the peak,' Scannell wants Saturday display to be a stepping stone

Munster's Ben Healy after the game

Niall Scannell believes Munster have to treat their impressive performance in heart-breaking defeat to Toulouse as a stepping stone to future success rather than a high point.

Munster lost out on a Heineken Champions semi-final against Leinster next weekend in the most agonising fashion, via a penalty-kick competition that followed 24-24 draw after extra time at Aviva Stadium on Saturday.

It was a performance that continued an encouraging run of good form that had started with a European Round of 16 aggregate victory over Exeter Chiefs and ran through United Rugby Championship wins over Ulster away and Cardiff. Yet now the URC title is the only trophy available to Munster with a final-round game against Leinster back at the Aviva on May 21 standing between them and a favourable play-off draw at the end of the campaign.

“It can’t be the peak,” Scannell said, “and when we turn the page that’s probably the way we are going to look at it. We’ll look at that as a huge stepping stone. There’s a lot of guys that maybe haven’t played at that level before that are there now. A guy like Jack Daly, people might have been surprised to see him on the bench but Jack’s been injured for a lot of the season and has worked just unbelievably hard all year and comes on and does that. I always knew he was a machine of a chop tackler but he was hitting some fellas there that are world-renowned ball carriers and he’s guy people probably weren’t talking about all year.

“A guy like Alex (Kendellen) has done it all year and I think it’s a stepping stone for those guys and hopefully that experience will be brilliant coming back up here to play Leinster in two weeks.

“We’ve huge ambitions in the URC and when you’re at a club like Munster you can’t shy away from that. There’s huge expectation to bring home trophies and unfortunately that’s the end of the road for one of them but we still have the URC and we’ll look at that as a bit of a launchpad hopefully to put in bigger and better performances because that’s the game we’re in, high performance. We want to keep getting better.” Experienced hooker Scannell said the Munster players had tried to stay patient in the knowledge that poor mid-season form would be a precursor to better, more expansive performances.

“We’ve been laying the foundations for this all year and there was times during the season when we were getting a bit of hammering for attack but we were trying to stretch ourselves and get better all along and trust ourselves that it would click and when the big days came around that we would be able to expand that game like we did there.

“I think we have improved massively the last few weeks and it’s starting to click and there’s a lot more confidence and buzz about it and you can see it, particularly in the forwards. There’s a lot of lads running great lines, there’s lads that maybe a season or two ago weren’t willing to give that pass, that tip on that are now and we’re trusting each other.

"Our game’s growing but I think we had trusted that would happen all year and we had to believe that it would come good on the big days.”