Munster endure 10-year glitch

This is not Munster’s last dance, but the next time the music plays a couple more of the regulars won’t come to the floor.

This evening’s final is the first of three trophies on offer for Johann van Graan and his men before they bid farewell to CJ Stander, Billy Holland and JJ Hanrahan at the end of the season and, having done the hard work to get this far, the onus is on them to take the final step.

For a generation of men in red who grew up watching Munster win silverware and dreaming of doing the same, there is a law of diminishing returns at play.

They are getting older, a few more of their comrades are departing every year and the target keeps getting more difficult.

The addition of the South African franchises will make the Guinness PRO14 even harder to win, Europe remains difficult. If there’s one thing Munster have learnt during their decade in the hurt locker, it’s that you’ve got to take your chance in the final when you get there.

When they last won this tournament it was called the Magners League and the province’s recent success was such that it was considered something of a consolation prize.

They beat Leinster by 10 points at Thomond Park in 2011 a week after Joe Schmidt’s team became European champions.

If Paul O’Connell looked a little bit sheepish lifting the trophy, it was because he and his team-mates had grown used to bigger and better things.

Certainly, when head coach Tony McGahan spoke to the media there was no indication that he felt this was the end of something.

“It’s huge right across the board,” said McGahan. “From the playing group, the management and the organisation to development officers, young players coming through and, more importantly, the supporters, they can look around now and say that we have done something very important.

“We are delighted but we didn’t need this victory to prove that to us, we knew they would be ready.”

A decade on, they face into the same fixture this evening having not won a trophy since.

Conor Murray, Keith Earls and Stephen Archer are the only members of Munster’s 22-man squad still involved.

McGahan went back to Australia within a year, beginning a period of off-field instability that didn’t help as the greats of the 2000s began to step away.

Just when they needed a firm strategic direction, the province entered a period of flux and changed coach four times in less than seven years.

First, Kiwi Rob Penney came in promising to build “a new Munster”, but left after two seasons.

“It was massively challenging, but I was up for it,” he would later say.

“They were stuck between a rock and a hard place… There were just so many powerful influences behind the scenes and that’s why I had to go. It was either me going or other people moving on and that wasn’t going to happen, so...”

Penney got them to two European semi-finals, but Ronan O’Gara stepped away after the 2013 defeat to Clermont Auvergne in Montpellier, leaving a void that the province are still struggling to fill.

Still, O’Connell was involved and a new leader had emerged in Peter O’Mahony. When Penney turned down a one-year extension to move to Japan, Munster turned to Anthony Foley who took over with an all-local, inexperienced coaching ticket.

Early in Foley’s first season, O’Connell was having doubts about the direction in which the province was moving.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m having the same conversation with myself year after year,” he wrote in his autobiography The Battle. “I still long for the coach-led, player-driven, problem-solving culture we used to have.

“I think we need more players who turn up every day thinking, ‘This is our team. Whate.ver’s wrong, we can fix it’. There the ones you can hang your hat on. When you adopt that mentality, we’ll be playing to our potential again.”

Despite a poor European performance, Munster got to the PRO14 final in 2015 but were blown away by Glasgow Warriors.

It was O’Connell’s final game, “the biggest disappointment of my Munster career”, and they’d been hit by injuries to O’Mahony, Murray and Tommy O’Donnell but that didn’t ease the pain as the Scots ran them ragged at Ravenhill.

A year later, after another disappointing campaign, Munster brought in Rassie Erasmus as Foley’s boss and rejigged the set-up.

Interest was waning, but the tragic death of the legendary former No 8 and head coach in Paris galvanised the organisation.

On the pitch, the emotion fuelled an epic run to the 2017 European semi-final and another PRO14 final, but yet again they were blown away.

This time, it was the Scarlets who produced their own era-defining performance on the biggest day, scoring six tries in an incredible 46-22 win.

“It’s disappointing because that’s not the standard we had this whole season,” Erasmus reflected. “It’s a pity it happened in a final.”

Still, there was a sense that the Munster project was coming together again and yet already speculation was circulating about Erasmus’s future.

Sure enough, he was recruited to lead the Springboks to World Cup glory and again Munster were back at the drawing board.

They kept it South African, but unlike Erasmus, who had a stellar pedigree, the man they turned to came from so far under the radar he didn’t have a Wikipedia page.

Johann van Graan arrived with a reputation for being a highly technical coach who was so popular with his players he was groomsman at a number of their weddings.

He took over mid-season and, while a substantial part of the first few months in charge saw him have to defend the club’s decision to sign Gerbrandt Grobler and fend off rumours of players leaving, he managed to get them to the Champions Cup and the PRO14 semi-finals.

Again, they came up short. Racing blew them away in Bordeaux, while a weakened Leinster still proved too strong a week after beating the Parisians in Bilbao.

That summer, Simon Zebo joined Donnacha Ryan in Paris and again Munster were rebuilding while staying competitive to a point, but hitting a glass ceiling at the end of the season – usually painted blue by Leinster.

Van Graan has been backed, but he’s also been unlucky. Having convinced Joey Carbery to come south, he’s barely had him available. He landed blue-chip signings in Damian de Allende and RG Snyman, only for the second-row to do his cruciate on his debut.

Still, they go into the last few months of the season in the hunt for three trophies and this evening’s return to the RDS is their best chance at scratching their 10-year itch.

In January 2020, we asked O’Mahony – now 31 – if he worried that his career might pass him by without him ever winning a trophy with his home province.

“Yeah, of course, yeah. Yeah…” he said. “It’s one of my biggest worries.”

The team O’Mahony came into looks vastly different to the one he’ll lead at the RDS today and he knows from experience that next season, when they approach the start-line, it will look different again.

There is hope in the young and talented players coming through, but a decade ago the same was said of O’Mahony, Zebo, Murray and others.

He knows now that you can’t rely on potential, you have to go out and seize the day.

As he leads the team out into the stony silence of the Dublin 4 venue, the captain will be determined to avoid another of those gut-wrenching post-match interviews. Instead, he’ll be desperate to lift a trophy for the first time in red. There’ll be nothing sheepish about his grin if he and his team-mates end their long wait.