Munster aim to bounce back against in-form Bulls after heavy loss to Sharks
Munster head coach Clayton McMillan said his players did an "outstanding job" in the post match review of their 45-0 defeat to the Sharks. Pic: Shaun Roy/Sportsfile
When even the Bulls’ team announcement is so, well, bullish, about their intentions to dismantle Munster’s gameplan at Loftus Versfeld on Saturday (12:00pm Irish time) you know Clayton McMillan’s under-pressure side are in for a long afternoon on South Africa’s High Veldt.
The Pretoria franchise are on a roll under head coach Johan Ackermann as the URC campaign rumbles towards the end of the regular season and they will come into this Round 14 of 18 fixtures with gathering momentum having swatted aside play-off rivals Cardiff 50-7 at the same venue last weekend, their fourth win from their last five league matches.
“The Vodacom Bulls look well-equipped to cope with whatever Munster throws at them,” concluded Friday morning’s official website post as Ackermann’s Springbok-laden line-up was unveiled, and who could argue as the names of Handre Pollard, Kurt-Lee Arednse, Canaan Moodie and Willie Le Roux were revealed in the backline, with flanker and captain Marcell Coetzee leading a pack which includes Gerhard Steenkamp and Johan Grobbelaar in the front row.
With Marco van Standen, Jan-Hendrik Wessels, Cobus Wiese and Cameron Hanekom among the Bulls’ bomb squad of replacements there will be no hiding place for Munster as they look to rebound from a bruising 45-0 hammering by the Sharks at sea level in Durban last Saturday.
That Munster Rugby’s off-field plight has been thrown into the public domain this week as well, with the province seeking applications from within the organisation for a newly-initiated voluntary redundancy programme, only adds to urgency for a performance on the pitch but while acknowledging on Thursday the need for the wider operation to “roll their sleeves up” to find solutions to the economic situation, head coach McMillan also recognised the time has come for his team to deliver.
Two places above the Bulls in sixth heading into the weekend, there is still time to secure a top-four league finish which will guarantee a valuable and vital home quarter-final on the last weekend in May but after just four wins in their last 12 across the URC and Champions Cup, the clock is ticking for an upturn to kick in.
To that end, as revealed earlier in the week, McMillan and his coaches handed their post-Sharks review over to the players last Sunday night as Munster moved onto to a familiar Cape Town base to prepare for their next challenge. Each unit within the team, combination by combination delivered their own post-match analyses and the New Zealander liked what he saw and has seen from that point given the despair that his squad’s Kings Park performance engendered.
“I think the first sign that people actually care is the obvious disappointment in the room when you come off a game,” McMillan said. “Regardless of whether you're winning or losing or you're in tight ones, I think over the balance of the season, coaches are always assessing what's the best way to review a game, what's the best way to preview a game. You can take a heavy-handed approach. You can wrap an arm around people. You can skin the cat a hundred different ways.
“We just felt as a coaching group that it was an opportune time for the players to put a bit more skin in the game and review their own areas and to report back to their peers. I thought they did an outstanding job. It actually reminds you that as coaches we put in a lot of effort, but we don't always have the answers and that's okay.
“Sometimes some of your players can open your eyes to how much they actually know or what you don’t, just look at things through a slightly different lens. A lot of what they reported back on, we would have expected them to. It would have been very similar to what we reported, but there's a power and there's value in them doing it.
“It's probably not an every week thing. Like I said, every week you're challenging yourself and your group to review in different ways and this was just one of them.”Â
The Munster boss is hoping that bit of self-assessment at a critical point in the season will pay dividends, perhaps saving him from reaching too soon for that emotional call to arms from a coach that can only be delivered sparingly throughout a campaign.
“I think that's a shared load every week. You don't want to be a one-trick pony. You don't want to be driving the emotional button every week. It's a shared responsibility.
“All I can say is that there's been a good edge around the group this week. Obviously, the injection of some of our internationals brings a natural element of leadership into the group and that's all really positive. But it counts for nothing unless we see evidence out on the field of that edge or the hurt that you feel from the previous game.
“That's the luxury of rugby. It's the beauty of rugby. We generally get another week to right some wrongs. We either do that or we don't.
“We've worked really hard this week. I think it's been a really positive week but again, all will be told through the performance on the weekend.”Â
W le Roux; C Moodie, S Gans, H Vorster, K-L Arendse; H Pollard, E Papier; G Steenekamp, J Grobbelaar, F Klopper; R Vermaak, R Nortje; M Coetzee – captain, E Louw, N Carr.
Replacements: M van Staden, J-H Wessels, K Mchunu, C Wiese, C Hanekom, Z Burger, C Jooste, D Kriel.
B O’Connor; C Nash, D Kelly, A Nankivell, S O’Brien; J Crowley, C Casey - captain; M Milne, D Barron, M Ala’alatoa; J Kleyn, F Wycherley; T Ahern; A Kendellen, B Gleeson.
N Scannell, J Loughman, J Ryan, E Edogbo, G Coombes, P Patterson, JJ Hanrahan, J Hodnett.
Hollie Davidson (Scotland)
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