The nearer Munster's day of reckoning looms the starker their plight becomes. Defeat on Saturday to last season's beaten Heineken Cup finalists Saracens on their Allianz Park 4G pitch and Munster's European Champions Cup campaign will be over. As Anthony Foley put it, no more tomorrows.
For Paul O'Connell, that could be especially true. The Irish captain has yet to decide whether he will play on after the 2015 World Cup until the end of next season, meaning that this weekend could effectively mark the end of his 14th and final European campaign for the men in red.
It would leave an awfully hollow feeling for the remainder of the season within the organisation, and for O’Connell himself, and to underline the scale of their task, he rates their chances of playing European rugby in April as “probably slim”.
“They’re probably slim,” he repeats. “We’ve to do something I wouldn’t say that we haven’t done before. I think in Anthony’s era we were in a similar position when we lost to Perpignan over there, and we managed to pull through but it’s going to take a little bit of luck to go away to Saracens and to win this game is going to be really difficult.”
Indeed, a week after that second pool defeat in 2002-03 against Perpignan, Munster pulled through courtesy of their famous 33-6 win at home to Gloucester, but that O'Connell recalled the so-called 'Miracle Match' from his second European campaign further demonstrates the kind of performance required.
That they’ve been here before, and entered so many make-or-break Januarys, doesn’t reduce the fear factor or reality of their situation. “It’s still as fresh as ever, these weeks are as hard as ever. They’re nervy, edgy weeks in the build-up. I suppose you’re afraid of the consequences of losing and you know what opportunities winning can bring.”
“For me as well, I know how tough it is going over there. They’re a really clever team, very hard to analyse, very unpredictable. They prey on a lot of your errors and they force teams into errors so it’s going to be a very tough game for us. It would be fantastic to get a result, get a win over there and give ourselves a shout and a chance of qualifying but it’s going to be very difficult.”
High emotion week
What Foley also described as a high emotion week is something that O’Connell says comes naturally to the squad.
“I think guys know what’s at stake and it kind of happens naturally. Rugby’s still a physical game and you need to be ready emotionally to dig in and go hard but you need to be accurate as well. I think if you look at our first game we had a great combination of both, it was a brilliant atmosphere in Thomond Park, we were really up for the game and really accurate in everything we did as well.”
“We kicked really well, our set-piece was good, lineout, scrum and we managed to get a score off our lineout, a few penalties as well. At the same time, they stole three line-outs off us but I think you’ve got to have a good combination of the two, where you’ve got to be really ready to physically go against these teams but you have to be really accurate against them as well, especially a team like Saracens because they score so many tries off your mistakes.”
Munster also have the richest of histories in somehow advancing to the knock-out stages and maintaining their interest in Europe to beyond the Six Nations in all but one of the last 15 campaigns.
Tradition
“It probably matters. I think tradition is a good thing. You look at the way the lads are preparing for this week. They know there is probably something important to be protected and something important to play for. It probably leads, as I say, to a kind of a nervy, edgy week and a nervy, edgy build-up. But even if you look at the bonus point we managed to get against Clermont at the end of the game, when we were down and out, I think it shows that the team has good values and that we’re clever and that we never gave up. Hopefully we’ll show that again this weekend.”
O’Connell was part of the nearly men who became two-time champions, something of a golden era which both inspires and draws comparisons with the beaten semi-finalists of the last two seasons.
“It’s hard to compare,” he says. “It’s a different landscape with the way the French teams are. I know that the work ethic of the team is incredible. I know guys are incredibly eager to be successful and certainly the pressure is on the team from that ’06, ’08 crew. It was a special group of players that came together with an AIL grounding. It’s very different to the way players come into a professional set up, that was a very different group of players.”
"I think potentially we could be that good. We just don't always meet that potential when we play. I think for the last two years we've been inconsistent. When we're good, we're very, very good but we don't seem to back it up week-on-week like I suppose Leinster have done in previous years or Toulon seem to do or Clermont seem to do. I think that's where we need to get to if we want to emulate that ['06 and '08] team."
That can wait for the moment. This week Munster just need one of their monster one-off performances to keep their, and O’Connell’s, annual European dream alive.
