AMLIN CHALLENGE CUP SEMI-FINAL:THE HARLEQUINS director of rugby, Conor O'Shea, is light-heartedly accused of ruining the mother and father of Irish rugby weekends in Cardiff. "Well I'll be there," smiled the Terenure man who is a descendant of a pure Kerry sporting bloodline.

O’Shea must now prepare his rapidly convalescing club, after the Bloodgate saga of 2009, for the challenge of Michael Cheika’s Stade Francais in the Amlin Challenge Cup final on Friday night, May 20th, at the Cardiff City stadium (on the eve of Leinster’s Heineken Cup final at the Millennium Stadium).

There can be little doubt O’Shea played a substantial role in the mental preparation of a team lying seventh in the English Premiership to beat Munster at their own, newly-embraced, game and on their own hallowed turf. And yet, he refused such plaudits.

“When Chris (Robshaw, the Harlequins captain) came to me before the toss (saying) ‘I want to play into the wind because I want to play our game’ I knew at that point we were fine.”

O’Shea instructed his players to ignore all his public utterances in the build-up to this daunting task as he showered Munster with praise and respect. They clearly did just that. “Did I believe we could win? I’m a Kerryman, of course I did.”

Despite admitting Nick Easter’s decision to illegally plough into the Munster ruck, leading to a second yellow and red card on 70 minutes, could have proved decisive, O’Shea defended the England number eight by noting how he was “bullied and battered” at the Aviva Stadium in March and that Easter was on a mission to prove he could “be just as physically imposing as some of the Irish men on the pitch”.

With his right eye almost welded shut, Easter revealed how O’Shea had been goading him into this performance ever since he returned from the failed Grand Slam expedition. “Well, Conor hasn’t shut up about that for the last five weeks, to be perfectly honest with you. It is nice to get a win down here after what happened in Dublin. For me it was all about the club shirt and Harlequins and winning silverware in Cardiff because we have underachieved recently.”

O’Shea also conceded Harlequins rode a large dollop of luck to set up a play-off with Stade for a seat at Europe’s top table next season. “They’ll be disappointed not to have finished a couple of tries, but that is what we needed and we needed that energy. Maybe if one of those four (Munster try-scoring) passes had gone to hand it could have been a different game.

“I think once they picked Paul Warwick I knew they were going to try and throw it and play it. I wouldn’t say I was unhappy that that was the game plan they employed because that is the way we like to play it. They’ve done their study on us. We play a different style to a lot of sides but we are also a lot younger than a lot of sides in the Premiership and that catches up with us from time to time and we need wins like this and performances like this to actually have belief when we go away to tough grounds to win.”

So, the magnitude of this achievement won’t be lost on his young team? “They know. They don’t need me as a Kerryman to appreciate it more. They must have had some belief in themselves. This was never about me, and I said that last week. I’ve said to a couple of coaches how proud I am but this is about the players and they have inked a date in their memories that will live forever.”

For Munster it is a devastating result but James Coughlan was not prepared to blame referee Roman Poite despite two dubious penalties in the second half, on himself and Paul O’Connell, that were converted into six points. “We can’t be looking at the ref. The game was there to be won and we didn’t. That is something we have to look at ourselves. We lost the game, not him.”

Peter Stringer immediately looked for partial redemption in the upcoming Magners League semi-final. “We’ve no option but to get over it. We’ve found ourselves losing semi-finals the last couple of seasons. It has been very disappointing but it is a hurdle we have to get over.”

The last words must go to O’Shea’s father Jerome, a three-time All-Ireland winner with Kerry: “My dad always said a good semi-finalist never made a good finalist,” said Conor.