Munster correct their course to Croke Park but injury list grows more extreme

Gavan Casey

SUCH WAS THE deluge on Leeside on Saturday that a pipe burst under Oliver Plunkett Street, expelling raw sewage onto the tarmac.

One wondered if Cork City Council’s water department would face a further clean-up on Musgrave Park’s puddly 3G surface, where Munster’s URC meeting with the Ospreys would surely stink to high Heaven in the conditions.

But what impressed head coach Graham Rowntree most in Munster’s much-needed response to last week’s Zebre debacle wasn’t just their physical intensity, but their pinpoint accuracy.

And this bonus-point, 23-0 success over their 2023/24 play-off opponents was indeed an exemplar of both.

That Munster left Ospreys to contend with a goose egg as they trudged through the sludge on their way back to Cork Airport was illustrative of a defensive intensity that was glaringly absent in Parma. But the hosts’ tries — and in particular the bonus-point score by Jack O’Donoghue — would have caught the eye on a dry track, not to mention in an episode of ‘Blue Planet’ as Ospreys coach Toby Booth described the fixture.

Sure, Shay McCarthy’s opportunistic opener inside 10 seconds was born of a greasy ball spilled over his own shoulder by Owen Watkin, but there were style points to Munster’s next three tries.

Niall Scannell’s dexterity in handing the ball off to Tom Farrell at the back of a maul for the second was as innovative as it was effective. Craig Casey’s 30-metre, left-handed skip pass to Calvin Nash for the third is fast becoming one of the scrum-half’s trademarks but for the man of the match to invoke it with a bar of soap was even more impressive. And the set play to unleash Shay McCarthy and, later, O’Donoghue to seal the fifth match point was one of the most picture-perfect pieces of play of the URC weekend.

“At the end of a challenging week, I’m really proud of what we’ve done there tonight,” said head coach Rowntree post-game.

The Englishman singled out for praise some of his less seasoned charges, McCarthy who finished with a try and an assist and Garryowen recruit Bryan Fitzgerald whose impact on either side of the ball boded well for his chances of extending his dream opportunity in the pros beyond his existing three-month contract.

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The only downside of an excellent performance was that such inexperienced figures will likely need to be leaned upon once more as Munster head for Croke Park to face old enemies Leinster next Saturday.

Alex Nankivell was touch-and-go heading into this weekend and might well replace Fitzgerald at GAA HQ, but the Kiwi currently features on an injury list which on Saturday night saw the names of Oli Jager, Peter O’Mahony and Mike Haley scribbled onto it. And the ink must be running dry at this point.

While Rowntree stressed that he sees no point in worrying about such players until Munster “get the scan results back and we see how they are” on Monday, the province’s absentee list borders on farce in its sheer length.

As well as Nankivell, Jager, O’Mahony and Haley, the players either doubtful or definitively ruled out for next Saturday’s interpro are Patrick Campbell, Thaakir Abrahams, Liam Coombes, Shane Daly, Diarmuid Kilgallen, Billy Burns, Paddy Patterson, Rory Scannell, Roman Salanoa, Cian Hurley Edwin Edogbo, Tom Ahern, Ruadhán Quinn and Brian Gleeson. Meanwhile, Alex Kendellen, Seán O’Brien, Ben O’Connor, Seán Edogbo, Ronan Foxe, Evan O’Connell, Danny Sheahan and Ethan Coughlan are in South Africa with Emerging Ireland, while loosehead George Hadden is on his way to the Rainbow Nation to replace injured provincial teammate Mark Donnelly in Simon Easterby’s squad.

It’s not great.

Describing next weekend’s meeting with Leinster, who twice beat Munster during the regular season last term, as a “huge game”, Rowntree admitted his primary concern will be “getting bodies on the field”.

He added that Munster will “modify” their plan for Monday’s training session and begin to focus on Leinster on Tuesday.

“We’ll see what we can put on the field”, Rowntree reiterated.

Amidst all of that uncertainty, Munster against the Ospreys did answer any lingering questions as to whether they might lack the minerals to contend this season.

Those questions were justified after they conceded 17 tries — and 108 points — across three games stemming back to their final pre-season meeting with Gloucester, which could have been uglier had George Skivington not swapped out virtually his entire team at half-time.

But the answer, too, was obvious. This was a rare downturn in form for the URC’s most miserly defence across the last two seasons, but there was equally precedent for Saturday’s pulling up of the drawbridge.

Between March and April 2023, in what transpired to be Munster’s URC title-winning campaign, Rowntree’s side shipped 130 combined points in three games to Scarlets, Glasgow and the Sharks.

There were caveats to this uncharacteristically leaky run: Munster buried a beloved figure in Tom Tierney two days before the Scarlets game at Musgrave Park. There was a three-week gap to the Glasgow defeat at Thomond due to the Six Nations, a gap which Rowntree filled with friendlies last season. And both the Sharks and Durban proved too hot on a short-week trip off the back of the Glasgow spanking.

But Munster were shellshocked upon their return from South Africa. They had a three-hour clear-the-air meeting upstairs in the High Performance Centre at the University of Limerick. Defence coach Denis Leamy identified a couple of areas in which they had become sloppy — most notably that their obsessive emphasis on speed had actually begun to take precedent over performing certain defensive roles properly. The players and coaches effectively hit the reset button on their season, initially stripping their game back down to the core basics of what has made Munster Rugby famous.

Munster didn’t lose again that season and while their possession-based attack remained easy on the eye, they conceded only 34 combined points in their three URC play-off games — away to Glasgow, away to Leinster and away to the Stormers — en route to the title.

This week, both Leamy and captain Tadhg Beirne were open about the fact that much of Munster’s internal dissection of the six-try defeat to Zebre last Saturday centered around attitude and physical application.

That much would appear fixed, at least, because Saturday night’s victory was a genuinely impressive antithesis of a defeat in Parma which will go down in infamy.

It’s a bit early in the season for turning points but Munster certainly corrected their course towards Croke Park for a far greater test.

Now, they just need to fix a handful of sore bodies if they are to inflict some pain on their fiercest rivals.