When I was a boy there was huge jasmine vine growing in the backyard of my parents home. For 11 months of the year it was a green labyrinth of nondescript tangled bush.
Then for a few brief weeks each spring the wonders of nature would transform this bland plant into a shimmering white mass of energy as thousands of tiny blossoms burst into a creation of beauty.
The visual impact of the snow white flowers is not the jasmine plant’s most potent effect on humans. What I recall most is the abundance of its sweet perfume that filled my parents home each spring.
Joey Carbery, Munster and Ireland - where did it all go wrong?
Medical science tells us that our olfactory system, which is our sense of smell, has a direct connection to the hippocampus and amygdala regions of the brain. These regulate our emotions and memory. Certain odours fire up olfactory memories that can evoke vivid and long-forgotten situations from our past.
As a young schoolboy rugby player, every spring, when the scent of jasmine collided with my tender hippocampus, I knew that the business end of that rugby season had arrived.
To this day when I breathe in that gorgeous perfume I am transported back to my long-gone family backyard and a single phrase immediately fires up in my mind.
Play-off rugby.
One season during my schoolboy days, as the jasmine bloomed, our religious education teacher and our rugby coach, Brother Paul Leary, was teaching us about St Augustine of Hippo. He told us that in his early life St Augustine had been a bit of a lad, frequenting, as he put it, “houses of ill repute”. Despite some wild nights out, later in life he repented, became a famous theologian and went to heaven.
We were all ears.
My team’s scrumhalf, who would go on to have a distinguished career in law, was searching for a loophole in the contract. He asked our coach: “If you play up and do a whole lot of drinking and things, but right at the end you are truly sorry, like St Augustine, then all is forgiven and you can get into heaven?”
“Yes,” was the unequivocal answer.
After some exceptionally shallow adolescent consideration we concluded that, as with everything in life, timing was going to be an exceptionally important factor. There was a lot of head nodding across our team. From then on St Augustine was our man.
For clarification, while St Augustine was unofficially adopted as our teams patron saint, we more closely aligned to the earlier “not just yet” period of his life, rather than his later, more pious period. Still, as the jasmine bloomed we were winning.
At that time in Australia, only the teams who finished in the top four played knockout rugby. There were no such thing as a quarter-final.
One of the most powerful innovations of the Heineken Cup in the 1990s was the introduction of pool matches to qualify for quarter-finals in Europe’s premier rugby competition. As the jasmine bloomed across the continent, the quarter-final weekend produced the best few days of club rugby in the world.
During the pandemic, it was as if the tournament’s administrators had read the famous prayer of the great theologian. “Lord, give me chastity and self-restraint, though not just yet.“
St Augustine uses humour to remind us of ”the human inclination to delay virtuous intentions for the allure of immediate gratification”.
EPCR have pursued the “immediate gratification” of emasculating the pool stages and raking in money in the lopsided Round of 16 before commencing the “virtuous” meritocracy of the quarter-finals.
In reality, the Champions Cup only starts this weekend.
EPCR would do well to also adopt St Augustine as the patron saint of the Champions Cup. Unlike my schoolboy team, they should focus on the second period of St Augustine’s life and seek redemption and forgiveness for butchering this once great competition.
I am doubtful whether the great theologian would consider immediately accepting the patronage, because despite their classic display of knockout rugby against La Rochelle, Munster could be the first team to reach the quarter-finals with only a 50 per cent winning record across the pool stages. Hardly a season of saintly consistency.
While taking nothing away form their gutsy performance against Ronan O’Gara’s team, La Rochelle have not won a single game since early January and they themselves had only a 50 per cent winning record before the Round of 16.
Under the meritocracy of the old pool game system, neither Munster nor La Rochelle would have earned a shot at a place in the quarter-finals.
None of this is a criticism of the clubs, but it is a damning indictment of the EPCR who set the rules.
Munster should heed some more sage words of my schoolboy teams patron saint. “Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan to build a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.”
For Munster, St Augustine’s foundation of humility is in realising that Bordeaux-Bègles possess far more attacking talent than they do. However, they do not possess more determination and desire.
Remember that every play-off match is a new beginning, so what has gone before is irrelevant. This fact can empower Munster’s forwards to lay down a foundation of ultra-aggression, combined with a teamwide bloody-minded defensive attitude that can frustrate the favourites into errors.
A play-off tactic used by the underdog since St Augustine togged out for the Hippo Hippopotamuses.
As for the EPCR, humility can come in realising that they have stewardship over one of world sport’s greatest products. It is not too late to confess that they have got it so terribly wrong that as it stands, the real Champions Cup competition does not start until the quarter-finals in April. Then act to rectify the injustice of this situation.
As for the rest of us experiencing the joys of spring, the great St Augustine advises us to “Learn to dance; so when you get to heaven the angels will know what to do with you.”
I imagine that back in his prime, St Augustine would have been great fun in the clubhouse after a match.
We already know that rugby is the game they play in heaven, so let’s dance and enjoy the start of the Champions Cup and the best weekend in world club rugby.
