Prendergast and Munster keen to repay Red Army at Páirc Uí Chaoimh 

Last week's defeat left Prendergast, his fellow coaches and the players determined to redeem themselves in the eyes of their supporters this weekend and repay the 4000-strong travelling army which followed them to England for round one. 

Munster's Shane Daly. Pic: Dan Sheridan/Inpho

After an aerial battering in Bath last Saturday, there was an assault of a different kind on Munster as they trained in the teeth of Storm Bram on Tuesday at their High Performance Centre.

“It was horrific,” senior coach Mike Prendergast said of the conditions at training in Limerick but the same could be said of the opening 30 minutes at The Rec when Munster went 28-0 down off costly errors in the air giving access to their 22, from where Champions Cup hosts Bath’s powerhouse pack wreaked havoc.

There was no way back from such an early shellacking, despite two tries in reply before half-time, and the end result was a 40-14 defeat which piles the pressure on ahead of this Saturday’s Pool 2, round two meeting with Gloucester in front of near sell-out crowd at Cork’s Páirc Uí Chaoimh.

It left Prendergast, his fellow coaches and the players determined to redeem themselves in the eyes of their supporters this weekend and repay the 4000-strong travelling army which followed them to England for round one. 

A large number of them had lined the route of their more than half-mile walk from the hotel to the stadium and their backing left a big impression.

“The support was incredible over there in Bath,” Prendergast said. “We came out of the hotel and it was I'd say towards 100 metres of a line of supporters on both sides. It was brilliant for some of the new people to come into the building and see that, and that's why we were really disappointed.

“We know people paid good money and went out of their way to make a big effort to go over there and even after our performance, we were disappointed but they're incredibly good to get around and you could hear the players saying that and we spoke about that.

“They stick behind you, so let's really give them something on the weekend. Yeah, there's disappointment, there's frustration but we have next week again, and that's a big thing.

“Sometimes you get knocked out of these competitions and we know that it's one of those ones that we have to (win) and sometimes that pressure is a good thing.” 

The senior coach’s review of Saturday’s game left a sense of what could have been. 

Conceding the fastest try bonus point in Champions Cup pool history since the scoring system was introduced had put Munster on the back foot but he saw enough in what followed to rue the team’s failure to take their chances, borne out by the stat that Munster had more visits to the opposition 22 than their hosts.

“This year we're making a lot of entries into the 22 either through line breaks or through a bit of tactical kicking or through the framework, winning penalties, etc. We are getting in there, we need to convert more, we need to be more accurate in there.

“We need to be more physical in there and I have no problem saying this because this is what we say to the players, and I think you always prefer to talk the truth about it and, and I think that's an area that we really want to see results.

“Because that was probably the disheartening part of it, you do go behind, you do fight, the lads fought back. It might not have looked as much, but when you actually strip it back we got into their 22 10 times, whereas they got into ours seven and they had 40 points.

“You’ve to do a lot to get in there and even last season it would have been a very strong point of ours, converting in there, so it's probably just one of those things and we've put a big light on it.

“That's what we’d really like to see, just consistency in that area because I think we're managing games quite well and even in our own last seven or eight metres, Bath had more reward.

“We had a game against Leinster last year in Thomond Park in poor weather and Josh or Caelan got a yellow, and we had so many opportunities in here (five metre zone) but they defended incredibly well.

“They came down here, our last five (metres) and they got four tries. Sometimes games can end up between the two six meres, through ill-discipline, through weather etc. We came up short that day, we actually did well tactically but it was that area and that's probably the area we need to get better at.”