An extraordinary audio message has been flying around parts of the rugby community in the last fortnight, especially in Limerick. Although not specifically the subject of the piece, Ireland’s rugby capital takes a few direct hits. The bullets were loaded by a current AIL coach and fired at one club in particular with theories to explain the mess that has unfolded there.
t is extraordinary because you’d need to be having a whole sequence of senior moments to commit something like this to a forum with all the tight-knit qualities of a string vest.
The monologue, which runs for almost five minutes, goes into some detail of what the coach thinks about the allegedly arseways manner in which the club in question is being run. It was delivered initially to a Dublin audience in a WhatsApp group. You’re not going to believe this but it was shared with outsiders, not just beyond the group but beyond the Pale.
Why this should have been deemed of interest to the Dubs is at one level encouraging, that they might be so open to learning from others’ perceived mistakes.
Even so, the candour and detail of the piece beggars belief. Wrapped up in the comings and goings on the coaching merry-go-round at this club, however, is the narrator’s clear conclusion that club rugby in Limerick, once predicated on an intense rivalry and loyalty, is a shadow of its former self.
This provided an interesting backdrop to events in the RDS last weekend. Another episode of the Old Firm, a local rivalry to stand alongside any other across the rugby world, had Munster backed into a corner: the prospect of a record sixth defeat on the bounce to Leinster. Coach Johann van Graan made the definitive coaching statement, and went full bore. In contrast, Leo Cullen in the blue corner parked some of his marquee talent on the bench.
The defeat felt like a 30-point hammering except with only a fraction of the margin — which heightened the pain. The Munster changing room had barely been cleared afterwards when their supporters were already deep into the post-mortem.
By the time they came up for air Stephen Larkham was briefing the press on how close Munster were to the team who have beaten them six times on the trot. For anyone who first picked up a red replica shirt after 2011, the date of Munster’s last time on top of a podium, this has become a rite of passage.
A couple of years before that 2011 Magners League final win over Leinster our colleague Dermot Crowe burst into the office of the sports editor and threw himself on the floor. This was not a unique occurrence.
This time, however, he had a point. A Clare man with a hurling correspondent’s brief, he begged for respite, and to be allowed onto the big ball beat. In between the sobbing and wailing the sports editor could just about decipher the message: Dermot would sooner stick needles in his eyes than write another feature on the crisis in Limerick hurling. Fair enough.
Three back-to-back All-Ireland under 21 titles from the turn of the century had been the equivalent of a slick sales pitch from Limerick, with no follow-up. A horde of men, women and children in green were convinced the journey to Croke Park on the first Sunday in September would be regular. Instead, nothing.
The only spin to Croker on the big day ended in defeat at the hands of Kilkenny. That was 2007, the meat in the sandwich of Munster’s Heineken Cup triumphs in 2006 and 2008.
Co Limerick loves its sport, but Limerick City is the spiritual home of Irish rugby, thanks to a unique set of circumstances: its appeal has always been broader than the private school set in Belfast, Cork and Dublin; Thomond Park was the scene for the defeat of the All Blacks in 1978, which spawned a stage play, a book, and enough newsprint to fill a warehouse; and Limerick clubs dominated the All-Ireland League when that competition breathed life into the club game post-1990.
It was the last bit that assisted Munster’s success in Europe and their absolute domination of the domestic scene for a decade, from 2000 to 2009. The AIL was probably the wrong model for the Irish game, as pointed out by former Ulster and Ireland coach Jimmy Davidson in an interview with BBC in the early days of the League.
He explained the provinces were the way ahead, supported by the club game. Was he mad? We were still breathing the intoxicating fumes of club games with crowds, games that involved travel to far-flung parts of the country, games that had actual points on offer to the winners.
Of course Jimmy was right. But the spin-off he might have missed was the canine factor: much of the AIL rugby was ugly and attritional but if you wanted to win then you needed a bit of dog.
We saw that from Garryowen on the opening day of the League, against Wanderers in Lansdowne Road. On it went. So while the AIL wasn’t providing Munster with the ideal all-round player it was at least giving them lads who didn’t lose the plot when backed into a corner. In competitive sport that counts for a lot.
Munster struggled with lots of other bits and pieces though. Their Academy has almost become part of Irish rugby folklore for taking so long to go from 0-60 miles an hour. The most colourful aspect of that yarn comes under the heading of ‘Copy and Paste’.
When the IRFU decided to devolve their National Academy into four provincial units we remember worried looks on the faces of Stephen Aboud and Willie Anderson, who between them had put together the programme for the IRFU Foundation in 1993, the precursor of the IRFU Academy. Indeed the Union thought of putting the academy label on it from the start but it sounded too professional. We still lived in amateur land.
Anyway, Aboud and Anderson feared standards would slip once it went regional. Like Jimmy Davidson, nobody was up for listening to that message.
Leinster got in on the ground floor, picking Aboud’s brain and seeing what would transfer successfully to their backyard. It took them a while to match the programme to what their environment demanded. It was all put together in a handbook. Munster photocopied the Leinster handbook.
We thought of that again last week as a Limerick rugby man, devoted to both club and province, neared apoplexy in his description of the state of play down there. “Why the f**k do we try and copy Leinster in everything when we’re different?” he asked.
As we’ve pointed out before, a key point of difference is population. It helps if you’re dealing with big numbers when trying to find quality. It helps if big business is on your doorstep and has no other professional sporting outlet to carry their brand. It helps if you have a sparkling new headquarters handed to you on a plate in a university setting not short on facilities.
Munster didn’t have this piggy back option. Yes, they have a top-of-the-range high performance centre in UL, but while the university tendered to get Munster on campus it wasn’t a gimme — rather a 15-year lease agreement that started in the summer of 2016.
Its arrival finally spelled the end for the crazy twin cities arrangement that obtained since the dawn of time, with players losing time and energy travelling the N20 between Limerick and Cork.
Garrett Fitzgerald, the late Munster CEO, used to dream of the N20 becoming the M20, but had to settle in the end for setting up in Limerick, a bitter political pill for a Corkman to swallow.
Some thought that was the final piece in the jigsaw. Some 12 years after Wallaby Jim Williams had complained of the madness surrounding Munster’s preparation — the insane travel, the lack of a supplements programme, the absence of a defence coach — they looked suited and booted and ready to challenge Leinster. Since then they have run through a raft of players and coaches.
The only one who seemed likely to give them what they wanted — the high king’s chair in Ireland as well as some silverware — was Rassie Erasmus. He was doing fine, supported by Anthony Foley, Jerry Flannery and Felix Jones, until answering his country’s call with a World Cup on the horizon.
Erasmus was loved in Munster but it’s worth remembering he bailed when he was busy telling us he was staying, and he left Johann van Graan’s number as a parting gift. It is inescapable that Van Graan, a hard-working man but a very conservative selector, doesn’t have the digits to dial up success on the biggest days. In Ireland that means beating Leinster when it matters.
You could ask what choice they had if their playing pool was so shallow and Leinster’s so deep? Call up the fellas who solved the Suez Crisis last week and dredge a bit wider and deeper.
The intriguing bit is that there seems to be private money available to buy in South Africans yet the pressing issue of talent generation never mobilised all hands on deck. If there was €600k for example to replace CJ Stander with Pieter-Steph du Toit, revised downwards to roughly half that for Jason Jenkins, why was there not cash to bump up the number of regional development officers in unproductive areas of the province?
David Nucifora is blamed for putting the mockers on the Du Toit deal, in the interests of good financial husbandry, even though it was private money rather than the IRFU’s. But why did the same Nucifora not display such parsimony when it came to central contracts for senior players no longer worth the wedge? Moreover, what did it cost the IRFU to part company recently with Peter Malone, whom Ian Costello — once a part of the Munster back room himself — will succeed soon as Head of the Academy?
Ironically, that part of Munster’s machine is producing a few senior players now, just as Malone is cut off. It’s worth remembering the Academy is not responsible for what comes in, rather what goes out. Naturally enough, there is a link between the two.
One of Leinster’s strengths is the oven-ready nature of their intake, which clearly makes what happens next a lot easier. The Munster intake now includes lads from Waterford and West Cork and Kerry, hardly hotbeds of development.
In a recent PRO14 game Jack Crowley, Darren Sweetnam and Gavin Coombes were all in the side, a milestone for Bandon Grammar and Bandon RFC. But what took so long? How can two schools, Pres and Christians in Cork, be responsible for 33 per cent of the input to the Academy?
And where are Munster on the quest to put together a group that understands and represents their identity? Jimmy Davidson used to marvel at the unique aspect each of the four provinces would bring to the national squad. But that was pre-professionalism.
The new dawn of pay for play was slow, but by now you can see how it tends to homogenise teams. If everyone doesn’t play the same way then they are not a million miles off each other, and the template for club structure seems to be industry-wide.
Carving an identity in that environment is not easy, but it’s worth the effort. Critically you can’t present it in place of the nuts and bolts that should be there anyway: the playing and financial resources. It’s an add on. Football author and analyst Graham Hunter, who has written extensively about Barcelona — a massive club with a cherished identity — sees its value in a game gone money mad.
“In football, many clubs across the world don’t need it, don’t want it, don’t talk about it, and just buy excellence,” he says.
“And that’s enough. But where you can put the right bonfire together and then throw a bit of gasoline on it — where people believe either because they’ve come up through the ranks or because they believe in the identity — you can see it work. Much as you pay players €250k a week, and the top 50 players around Europe have all of that — they actually want to feel better, that there’s an identity. The ones I meet and talk to and watch — you can give them cars and cash but they all benefit when they can say: ‘This is our identity; this is who we are.’”
When Munster started the journey in earnest in 2000 their supporters contributed hugely to the identity. Most of them were probably sports nuts who would follow anything in season, but first and foremost they became Munster rugby fans.
Over the last 10 years they have risen to false dawns and gone to bed reflecting on near misses. They might consider yesterday’s defeat among them.
Today, if you were a rugby development officer hanging a right coming out of Thomond Park you wouldn’t be long hitting the junction with the Ennis Road. From there, a short distance to the left would bring you to the Gaelic Grounds, home of the All-Ireland hurling champions for two of the last three years. Or go right to Caherdavin, and Na Piarsaigh GAA club. Na Piarsaigh became the first Limerick club to win an All-Ireland title, in 2016. You’d wonder now how easily you’d win hearts and minds around that neck of the woods.
Ireland’s rugby capital didn’t need a WhatsApp rant to realise it is no longer a pushover for Munster. Their question is will it ever swing back.
