RUGBY:TIME WAS when beating touring sides used to define them, but not any more. While scalping the Wallabies in November was nice, and leading the Magners League with daylight to spare is nicer still, were Munster to exit from the Heineken Cup tomorrow their season would be seen as abject failure.
To a degree, this is unfair. No other team has ever reached the knock-out stages for a dozen years in a row. If, or more likely when, it comes to an end, this record is unlikely to ever be equalled. In that timespan even the mighty Leicester went out at the pool stages four times, while Toulouse came up short of the last eight on three occasions. No one has a divine right to a place in the last eight. Not even mighty Munster.
Yet, were Munster eliminated tomorrow, much of the rest of the season would seem anti-climactic, beginning with what would amount to the unthinkable, a dead rubber against London Irish next Saturday at Thomond Park instead of one of those do-or-die Anglo-Irish showdowns in their Limerick citadel.
It was Munster’s march to the Twickenham final in 2000 which, along with the birth of the Red Army, the Holy Grail, etc, that kick-started the revival in Irish rugby. On five occasions they have been the only Irish survivors, which was a vital source of sustenance for the game here during the long mid-winter and after the Six Nations.
In all of this, they are a partly a victim of their own high standards in the competition. The Heineken Cup prompted Munster’s rebirth and now it defines them in a way that even matches against touring sides can no longer do. Not even the games against Leinster do that. And thus, tomorrow in Stade Felix-Mayol will define their season.
And it is that fear of elimination, added to the many great escapes they’ve pulled off in the past, which also inspires them, excites them and, according to Donncha O’Callaghan, almost sickens them with fear to the point of wishing the week away.
“I think it’s hard to say I’m looking forward to it,” O’Callaghan admitted with typical candour during the week. “It’s the old classic: everyone says go out and enjoy the game, but some games are too big to enjoy and this is definitely one of them. It’s nearly a test of you beyond a rugby player. It’s a test of your character. You are backed in to a corner and you have to get a result. It’s a must-win game and I’ll be honest with you, I don’t take an awful lot of enjoyment out of it.”
But O’Callaghan is also now experienced enough to know if he didn’t have such a sickening feeling in the pit of his stomach early in the week of a match of this importance, there’d be something wrong. “It’s great because you know these types of nerves are good. You can call on them. The appetite doesn’t go as much as it did when you were younger.
“In fact, now it feels worse because there are things expected of you personally and of the squad, which was the way we wanted it when we got into it first. We were always the team that everyone was glad to put as underdogs and play the backs-to-the-wall stuff. But now there is so much more expected from the squad, there is so much more expected of you personally. That adds to the pressure as well.
“That’s not a bad thing, it’s great that people expect us now to go and do great things in tough places because we’ve done it before. But you’re driven with both experiences of it, aren’t you. You’re driven by the great days when you’ve got results in places like Perpignan. And then you remember the bad days when you went and got stuffed. It’s no different to any other time we’ve played: our season always comes down to one massive match, and this Sunday is it. You can’t think beyond Sunday at 4pm. We have 80 minutes, and that’s us.”
Peter Stringer agrees that Munster are in their tightest squeeze since the Miracle Match in 2003 (Gloucester), though unlike O’Callaghan, he describes it as brilliant. “You need these games to bring the very best out of fellas and challenge guys and see what they’re made of.”
Unlike O’Callaghan, Stringer says he welcomes the fear too. “Fear is a massive thing that drives fellas and even week-in, week-out the fear of not performing, the fear of not producing the goods where you can look your team-mates in the eye. It’s all fairly clichéd but it’s something that means a lot as a player.”
He talks of the horrible feeling of not having earned the respect of your team-mates, and the desire to right those wrongs the following week, and believes that the aforementioned fear will make for that kind of clear mindset from early in the week.
One can argue about the merits of a schools game that is inordinately focused on a few one-off knock-out matches, but in weeks such as this, that DNA can be a good thing.
“You look at the season and you don’t want the Heineken Cup to finish now,” says Stringer. “It’s like schools rugby. You know you can have a shot at it and you could be leaving school next year and never have another go at it and it kind of has that feeling about it. You certainly don’t want to be out of a Heineken Cup in January. It’s just mid-season, only getting going.”
Cup rugby – be it the Munster Schools’ Cups, the Munster Senior Cups or the Munster Junior Cups – is what they were reared on. “It means winning the game, at any cost,” explains Stringer. “You try and build a season on performances and you try and improve those week-in, week-out to get to your ultimate goal but you’re at a stage where we’ll take a win over anything. And ideally we’ll need to play close, if not our very, very best to win the match. But you know if we’ve to win by kicking three, six, nine, 12 points, then you take it.”
Stringer’s schools career overlapped with Ronan O’Gara and Mick O’Driscoll, and he was part of two Senior Cup winning sides with Pres Cork; on the bench the first year and starting in his final year. The stand-out game – an 8-6 semi-final win over Christians in his final year – illustrates the point.
“It was just a dismal game but it was a win and it puts you through to a final and you can rebuild.”
No club has harnessed a more effective cup-winning mentality over the last two decades than Shannon. Stringer, in truth, only sampled that Shannon mentality and winning culture, whereas a host of others whose careers were harnessed in the Munster club game have almost moved on.
It’s true that the likes of Peter Clohessy, Mick Galwey, Keith Wood, Anthony Foley and others were replaced, but when Stringer is orchestrating and cajoling the juggernaut in front of him tomorrow, there’ll be no Marcus Horan, Jerry Flannery or Alan Quinlan, though with John Hayes and Paul O’Connell back, there is a more familiar look to it. That said, not even Munster forwards can go on for ever and you wonder does Stringer himself, or others, nurture fears that an era has to come to an end.
“I suppose guys are approaching the end of careers and you’d be looking for someone to step up to the mark. I think James Coughlan, Tony Buckley and guys like Donnacha Ryan, have that individually and it’s a matter of them bringing it forward collectively. That’s the challenge those guys have to face, to take ownership of the thing.
“Coming into the team you know they feed off the likes of Paulie, Hayes and Flannery. It’s a massive challenge but I think the character is within the squad. When you see the ambition and hunger in young fellas when they come up against the lads scrummaging or doing lineouts it’s something that they want. They want to achieve something and that’s the ambition and drive that you need from within a squad, and I see it in bucket loads in lads coming up.”
As one of the thirtysomethings, Stringer also has a responsibility to make sure that the baton is passed on, that the Munster conveyor belt can keep churning out the individual players and team ethic to maintain their standing alongside the Toulouses and Leicesters of the game.
“Over the years I’ve noticed that I’ve tried to be influential in the way I play and the advice I give to guys around me has become a massive part of my game and it’s something that I take great pride in, but also having to concentrate on my own play without having to worry about what else is going on.
“That’s a big thing for us. You worry about your own job and you know that you have the trust of the fella next to you, either side of you. So, in the build up to a game in the week’s training you pass on whatever you can and you ensure that come kick-off time that everyone is focused on their own job and that they’re not going to let you down.”
So maybe the era doesn’t have to end, and like other great sporting institutions, Munster can ensure it continues indefinitely. But, right now, the only way of achieving that is by winning tomorrow. Because this is the Heineken Cup, this is what defines Munster.
“It’s something that we love so much: it’s Europe and the fact it can go in 80 minutes of rugby, the fact of not being in it, would kill us,” admits O’Callaghan. “People talk about qualifying for the last 12 years, but we don’t look at it like that. You take it year by year. But it is a fear factor, and that’s what drives most of our squad, more than anything else, the fear of going out. Everyone tells you, you should be looking forward to great victories, but we’re a paranoid bunch.”
