Brendan O'Brien: Mighty Munster deliver the statement that Irish rugby badly needed

OFF TO THE RACES: Munster's Ethan Coughlan on his way to scoring a seismic try. Pic: INPHO/Dan Sheridan

Sixteen years. It’s been 16 years since Brian O’Driscoll intercepted Ronan O’Gara’s pass at GAA headquarters and confirmed in one canter the ending of one era and the dawn of another. Blue was the new red, and has been ever since.

So complete has the turnaround been that Leinster won 30 of the next 39 meetings between the provinces, 14 of the previous 16, with those two losses coming in a PRO14 semi-final when they took their eye of the ball, and a Rainbow Cup Covid filler.

So, yeah, this 31-14, bonus-point win for Munster is kind of a big deal.

Munster came to Croke Park at a low ebb in terms of this rivalry, with only four of their players named in Andy Farrell’s full Ireland squad for the upcoming November internationals against a platoon of 21 sourced from Dublin.

Leinster had 13 British and Irish Lions on the pitch, plus a two-time World Cup winner in RG Snyman. Three of those Lions made up Leinster’s reserve front row. And then Leinster went out and savaged Munster for the first seven minutes.

Cue a collective hard swallow.

They smashed the red wall twice, earned two scrum penalties and claimed the opening try through Ronan Kelleher. You feared for Munster then. By half-time you were marvelling at the turnaround and Ethan Coughlan’s facsimile of O'Driscoll's famous try.

If Croke Park was dressed mostly in blue then there were large islands of red, most notably on Hill 16, eager to clear their throats. And they had plenty of opportunity to let loose any pent-up frustrations from recent years after the game flipped on its head.

Coughlan’s intercept score came too early to be classed as some epochal exclamation mark. No-one was thinking then that this signalled anything so seismic as a changing of the provincial guard, but it signified a new script. That’s enough for them for now.

Munster needed this and Irish rugby needed this. It’s a statement performance and a statement result for the new Clayton McMillan project. The kind of evening that can turbo-charge a team and a culture and all that good stuff that a new coach aims for.

Whether the Ireland team needs this in the short term is another thing because Andy Farrell can’t have been all that enamoured with the bulk of his squad being played off the park in that first-half when they fell 21-7 in arrears.

Not with the All Blacks to come a fortnight down the line.

We shouldn’t do anyone involved the disservice of diluting this down to anything as reductive as a head-to-head but the Jack Crowley-Sam Prendergast question is critical to the national team’s fortunes and the Munster ten was extraordinary at times.

His clean-up work in taking high balls and either dancing out of contact or offloading in the tackle was sublime in that spell when Munster transformed this URC tie from a state of ‘uh oh’ to ‘oh wow’. His kicking from the hand was first-class.

Not everything he tried came off. There was one ill-judged crosskick cut out by Jamie Osborne that could have been costly only for a brilliant Dan Kelly cover tackle. And a lucky pass that Thaakir Abrahams turned into gold off the floor.

The chip kick that set Tom Farrell up for the second Munster try actually looked a fraction too long until the centre got his fingertips there before a cold Jimmy O’Brien just seconds off the bench, but these are the inches that go your way when in the zone.

And Crowley was in the zone.

Again, none of this happens in a vacuum. It’s impossible to write about this game without gushing like a schoolboy over Tadhg Beirne’s rugby equivalent of a Roy of the Rovers performance. Like, who makes six turnovers in one game? S-I-X.

Prendergast was left working off scraps for most of the first-half. As a situation it wasn’t helped by his team’s insistence on treating the ball like a hot loaf of bread in the first 40, or Munster’s stubbornness in their own 22 for most of the third quarter.

There was a delicious skip pass from the Kildare man to Jimmy O’Brien amid the blunt force trauma that his pack was looking but failing to impart, but the sounds of the Fields of Athenry shortly after that spoke for a game that was setting like concrete.

“We’re chasing them,” said Leinster head coach Leo Cullen on Friday. They sat eight places and eight points adrift of Munster when he said it. That gap come the final whistle here sat at 11 and 13 respectively, so he was right.

For the first time in a long time, Munster are the ones setting the pace in Irish rugby's biggest rivalry.