Build up of 'little things' hurt Munster in the end, says McMillan after Champions Cup exit

Castres claimed a famous win on the road in Limerick on Saturday.

Munster head coach Clayton McMillan before the Investec Champions Cup match against Castres. Pic: Seb Daly/Sportsfile

Clayton McMillan and Tadhg Beirne were left to rue a sloppy defensive performance on home soil at Thomond Park on Saturday night as his Munster side were eliminated from the Champions Cup before the knockout stages.

The 31-29 pool defeat to Castres was a bitter pill to swallow for Beirne on his 100th appearance for the club he joined from Scarlets in 2018, and for head coach McMillan in his first season at the helm having guided New Zealand’s Chiefs to four Super Rugby finals in his five years in Waikato.

The two match points his team collected for tries scored and the narrow margin of the loss were not enough to reach the Round of 16 in April and Munster will look to the three missed conversions from Jack Crowley, a yellow card for Tom Farrell and the easy manner in which they conceded two of the four Castres tries in Limerick quickly after taking the lead through their own scores.

A place in the knockout stages of Europe’s second-tier competition, the Challenge Cup, could still be available, dependent on them not finishing bottom of Pool 2, which would mean a Toulon victory on Saturday night at Gloucester.

Yet there McMillan pinpointed a litany of errors that contributed to Munster’s Champions Cup demise against a deserving Castres side in front of a 20,043 crowd at Thomond Park.

“There wasn't any one thing in particular,” McMillan said. “I think we missed a couple of kicks at goal. We fell off a few tackles. We created a few opportunities and didn't quite nail them. Missed a couple of lineouts.

“It's the accumulation of all the little things that make all the difference in the end. They hurt us.

“You win the game and they don't seem as important as when you lose, but that's the margins at this level if the game and games that have a lot riding on them. It's being on the right side of those moments. They had a few more than us.” 

Munster had trailed 17-12 at half-time but led 22-17 at the hour mark and had secured a try bonus thanks to two in the first half from Craig Casey, and one apiece after the break from Thaakir Abrahams and replacement lock Edwin Edogbo.

Yet the Farrell yellow card on 63 minutes for a neck roll on man of the match and first-half try score Vuate Karawalevu, the former Sydney Roosters Rugby League star, led to two Castres tries, from wings Geoffrey Palis and Christian Ambadiang and with a 31-22 lead, the Frenchmen took a comfortable lead into the final minutes that could absorb the concession of a second Edogbo try, converted, two minutes from time.

"I felt like when we went ahead, we were good and then we just lost our way briefly,” Beirne said. “We probably dug ourselves into a little hole for playing in our half a little bit at the point, but that had been working for us in the game so it's hard to go back and say we shouldn't have done that as well so they got a penalty, we were under pressure then and a few other things.

“They took a quick lineout and all of a sudden we were under pressure again. A few things that we just weren't ready for and we weren't switched on and we weren't good enough in those moments and they were able to exert more pressure onto us and capitalised on it.” 

Munster return to URC duty next week at home to the Dragons in Cork next Friday night having now lost four games in a row, to derby rivals Leinster and Ulster, and then to French sides Toulon and Castres. McMillan detected a common thread.

“We talked about at half time around: ‘Be urgent before you need to get desperate’. When it got out to nine points (behind) there late in the game, we saw an urgency about us and an accuracy about us that actually gave us an opportunity to get back in and score at the death and then give ourselves two minutes.

“Like Tadhg said, I think in patches last week and this week I thought we played some of our better rugby, and especially attacking-wise created some opportunities, but just not nailing enough of them.

“The big disappointment for me and the worrying trend I guess is that we work really hard to score some points, but we give up points very quickly after scoring.

“We don't make it hard for opposition to have to come back and get points, and that's the one worrying trend for me over the last three or four weeks.”