Beirne and Snyman return as Munster look to avenge Thomond defeat

RECOVERED: RG Snyman. Pic: INPHO/Ben Brady

After such a rollercoaster season, even by Munster’s standards, it is understandable that the coaching staff will head to Scotstoun for Saturday night’s BKT United Rugby Championship quarter-final against a formidable Glasgow Warriors side insisting only positives lie on the path before them.

The past five weeks have provided a microcosm of those ups and downs, starting with a heavy home URC defeat to Glasgow at Thomond Park and a chastening Heineken Champions Cup knockout exit at the hands of the Sharks in Durban that threatened to send Graham Rowntree and his new coaching ticket’s first season in charge into freefall. 

Munster had been on a roll, putting their shaky start to the post-van Graan era firmly behind them with an encouraging and mostly winning run of form from November to March as the team reaped the rewards of high-intensity training and a more expansive attacking mindset.

Then Glasgow and the Sharks ripped Munster apart on successive weekends and the track bottomed out in the deepest of dips and Rowntree’s men faced into a daunting two-game end-of-season tour to South Africa needing to rescue the campaign.

That they returned with a win and a draw against the Stormers and Sharks respectively, securing not just this play-off place but qualification for next season’s Champions Cup was nothing short of miraculous. 

Now they get a chance to avenge that 38-26 Thomond Park loss to Glasgow and reach the URC semi-finals with a team enhanced by the presence of returning forward Tadhg Beirne.

RG Snyman also returns to the second row having completed the return to play concussion protocols that caused the lock to miss the 22-22 draw with the Sharks while Beirne will start for Munster for the first time since January having injured his ankle in Ireland’s Six Nations victory over France.

It will come in the back row as captain Peter O’Mahony moves to openside flanker to accommodate his fit-again fellow Grand Slam winner on the blindside while Rowntree has selected six forwards on the bench with Alex Kendellen and URC Tackle Machine winner John Hodnett providing back-row cover.

It all represents a Munster squad looking far more energised than the collective that exited the competition at the same stage last year on the back of a lacklustre defeat at Ulster.

Leamy on Tuesday acknowledged the high level of difficulty attached to beating a side that last lost on home soil in January 2022 but again he emphasised the upside.

"This is an unbelievable challenge, a brilliant opportunity. We're relatively new into the job, this is our first quarter-final and it's an unbelievable opportunity to go to a place like Glasgow.

"It's such a difficult place to go; it was difficult when I played and it's gotten even harder over the years.

"They're a genuinely quality team who have lost just once since November, you've got us just with the ability to take another step forward and that's the challenge.

"We need to go there and put in a performance, as hard as it will be and as difficult as it will be but it's an exciting opportunity.

"We feel that we can go there and put in a really good performance.

"The boys have been really good the last three or four weeks, the training session today was one of our best."

Clearly, there will need to be an improvement on the first-half performance that allowed Glasgow to open a 31-0 lead inside the opening 44 minutes at Thomond Park on March 25 when Leamy bemoaned a substandard effort in contact and defensively in general, as well as sloppiness in attack. 

Yet he has been impressed by the squad’s ability to turn things around in South Africa in the last two games of the regular season and significantly, the trip has given Munster the ability to approach this away quarter-final with confidence.

"It gives you great belief in one way and shows the outside world the work we have been doing over the last eight, nine months,” Leamy added.

"We haven't always shown it, but it came together in a really good fashion in the last couple of weeks in tough places. Really tough places; Cape Town and Durban against really good teams.

"We got the basics of the game right, those fundamentals in terms of our set-piece and our ability to win gainline through tough carries was really, really good.

"Let's hope we continue that on Saturday, because it will be really, really tough."

GLASGOW WARRIORS: O Smith; S Cancelliere, S Tuipulotu, S McDowall, K Steyn – captain; T Jordan, G Horne; J Bhatti, J Matthews, Z Fagerson; S Cummings, R Gray; M Fagerson, R Darge, J Dempsey. 

Replacements: F Brown, N McBeth, S Berghan, JP du Preez, L Bean, S Vailanu, A Price, H Jones. 

MUNSTER: M Haley; C Nash, A Frisch, M Fekitoa, S Daly; J Crowley, C Murray; J Loughman, D Barron, S Archer; J Kleyn, RG Snyman; T Beirne, P O'Mahony - captain, G Coombes. 

Replacements: N Scannell, J Wycherley, R Salanoa, F Wycherley, J Hodnett, C Casey, B Healy, A Kendellen. 

Referee: Andrea Piardi (Italy).