Beirne and Rowntree agree Munster forced it too much against Glasgow
Munster's Peter O'Mahony dejected after the defeat to Glasgow. Pic: Dan Sheridan, Inpho
T was a bitter pill to swallow on Saturday evening as another rollercoaster Munster season that had begun to promise so much suddenly bottomed out at exactly the wrong time.
A semi-final defeat is never easy to digest but after steering his defending champions to first place in the final URC league standings and extending a winning run since January 1 to 10 games with the previous weekend’s quarter-final victory over Ospreys, this loss to Glasgow Warriors could have Munster head coach Graham Rowntree reaching for the Gaviscon for weeks on end.
Munster had done the hard part over the second half of the campaign, overcoming an unusually lengthy mid-season injury list which had left them in 11th place in November and without either an away win or an interprovincial victory at the turn of the year to collect 44 of their final tally of 68 points between February 16 and June 1.
It was form that sent them into the knockout stages as top seeds and with home advantage laid out in front of them all the way to the final. So to fall short just 80 minutes from the finishing line with this loss at Thomond Park in front of all but a handful of visiting Glaswegians in the 20,052 crowd on Saturday was a devastating blow to all concerned, the near silence that greeted that the final whistle telling you all one needed to know about the effect of the outcome on the vast majority.
There was little complaint about the victors, with the fourth-seeded Warriors now facing a Grand Final this Saturday at the second-seeded Bulls in Pretoria. Glasgow avenged the previous season’s quarter-final defeat at Scotstoun with cold-blooded calculation. Franco Smith’s team pounced on the rare opportunities presented them to score a try in each half, and rode their luck both in surviving two yellow cards across the first 50 minutes and when Munster failed to take their numerous try-scoring chances from excellently-created positions. They also managing the game clock beautifully to stifle any late comeback from the home side after Antoine Frisch had scored on 55 minutes to give Munster hope as Jack Crowley’s conversion made it 14-10.
It should have been one of many tries but both Rowntree and captain Tadhg Beirne, his side’s most outstanding performer on the night, were left to rue missed opportunities and a lack of composure as their team chased the game and just tried that bit too hard.
“Yeah, that’s a composure piece with the players,” Rowntree said. “We speak about one more ruck rather than an offload, which is brilliant if it comes off, you go ‘what a cracking offload!’ But we were just a bit guilty of forcing things a bit too much.”
It was a criticism which echoed the boss’s assessment of Munster’s second-half collapse at Sandy Park in December when Exeter Chiefs blew a 19-10 half-time lead in their Champions Cup pool match but though the problem came back to haunt his side, Rowntree insisted the work-ons had produced improvements in that area.
“You can be quite clever after the event, with guys trying, try and pass and it comes off and it’s brilliant, try and offload and it comes off and it’s brilliant. But I think our composure has improved dramatically.
“There’s not one consistent thing that we’re not doing every week, you’ve just got to take your chances.”
The captain also referred to the previous week’s performance in beating Ospreys, which had seen Munster’s try-scoring verve stifled by a resilient defence and forced a more pragmatic approach.
“You’ve got to give credit to the opposition as well in forcing mistakes too,” Beirne said. “We’ve had some good opposition over the last two weeks and talking about the composure piece as well, just forcing things a little bit.
“We’ve spoken a little bit as well, at times we’ve had moments where we’ve gone off script, the gameplan, and that has led to errors. I don’t think we really went off the gameplan today, maybe we probably did when there was 70 minutes on the field.
“We probably overplayed a little bit inside our 40. Ten minutes is a long time in rugby and that’s probably something we’re going to look at next week, we don’t need to play five or six phases inside our 40, we should be probably clearing that. That leads to a scrum and then eventually to three points and unfortunately a red card so they’re moments in the game where we have to be smarter, be more composed and stick to the gameplan.
“We were one score behind at that point so they’re things we’ll definitely have to fix and unfortunately as Pete said before the game, ‘there’s no tomorrow if we lose’ and there is no tomorrow and everything we look at now is for next season. That’s going to hurt, the next few days are going to hurt and that’s sport and we’re just going to have to get on with it.”
Andrea Piardi (Italy)
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