Niall Scannell drew the short straw, hauling his aching body down the corridor to face the media. The Munster hooker had chalked up 54 minutes in a contest of primal attrition and bore one or two scars of the exertion.
The lineout return of 94 per cent was an accolade worth celebrating as a unit against an outsized Toulouse pack, but his contribution was more far reaching in terms of carries, tackles, offloads, and turnovers.
The nature of the defeat naturally inspired a few regrets, but Scannell explained that it cannot define where Munster want to go in performance terms. “”It can’t be the peak and when we turn the page that’s probably the way we are going to look at it. We’ll look at that as a huge stepping stone. There are a lot of guys that maybe haven’t played at that level before that are there now.
"A guy like Jack Daly, people might have been surprised to see him on the bench, but Jack has been injured for a lot of the season and has worked unbelievably hard all year; [he] comes on and does that. I always knew he was a machine of a chop tackler.
“A guy like Alex [Kendellen] has done it all year and I think it’s a stepping stone for those guys and hopefully that experience will be brilliant coming back up here to play Leinster in two weeks.”
Scannell accepted that Munster must park the disappointment and redirect their focus to the United Rugby Championship, aware that they need to bring the same intensity and commitment to trying to win that tournament. The first step is in a fortnight’s time when they face Leinster in the final round of league matches.
He said: “We’ve huge ambitions in the URC and when you’re at a club like Munster you can’t shy away from that.
“There’s huge expectation to bring home trophies and unfortunately that’s the end of the road for one of them but we still have the URC, and we’ll look at that as a bit of a launchpad hopefully to put in bigger and better performances because that’s the game we’re in, high performance. We want to keep getting better.”
The progression and evolution in Munster’s attacking patterns has been noticeable over the past few matches. Scannell said it was the manifestation of hard work bearing fruition. “Well I suppose we’ve been laying the foundations for this all year.
“There were times during the season when we were getting a bit of hammering for attack and stuff but we were trying to stretch ourselves and get better all along and trust ourselves that it would click and when the big days came around that we would be able to expand that game like we did there.
“I think we have improved massively the last few weeks; it’s starting to click and there’s a lot more confidence and buzz about it and you can see it, particularly in the forwards. There’s a lot of lads running great lines, there’s lads that maybe a season or two ago weren’t willing to give that pass and we’re [now] trusting each other.
“It obviously wasn’t enough today but I still think we put together some unbelievable attack and I would hope that we could keep growing. I think in other years maybe we didn’t stretch ourselves enough in the winter months and then on the hard tracks against the big boys we didn’t have that in the locker. So that’s where we’ve been trying to expand our attack and hopefully we’ll now start to see it pay dividends in the URC.”
