Munster aim for some Aviva joy against Leinster
THERE was so much to Munster’s 2016/17 campaign, it seems churlish to boil it down to brass tacks but at the end of it all they finished with battered pride on the Aviva Stadium turf. Twice.
Tomorrow, they will return to the venue in the hope that lessons have been learnt from their Champions Cup semi-final loss to Saracens and their PRO14 final defeat to Scarlets.
In Leinster, they have the perfect barometer for their progress. A fellow top-four European team who will road-test their game ahead of the Champions Cup challenges to come.
Bragging rights are on the line, momentum will be nice but for Rassie Erasmus and his coaches this will be a valuable experience in terms of gauging where the team are at.
At the end of a season in which Munster’s game-plan was more than strong enough to beat the vast majority of teams, they were shown they still had some distance to travel against the elite.
Absorbing that message is the key.
“If you lose against Scarlets and get beaten by Saracens, and you don’t implement the things you learned, it was only a beating, it wasn’t a lesson learned,” Erasmus said.
Erasmus was only getting used to his surroundings when he first visited the glass bowl in Dublin 4 a year ago for the first of three losses at the venue.
The Leinster defeat was Anthony Foley’s final game in charge.
His tragic death occurred a week later and after that the Reds somehow mustered a scarcely believable run of results that drove them to their best season in years.
In Conor Murray, they have a world-leading scrum-half and the next step is for Tyler Bleyendaal and Ian Keatley to step up their capacity to identify opportunities and be ruthless in taking them.
The Kiwi came in for deserved criticism after the Saracens game, but he was operating without the injured Murray and behind a retreating pack.
Up against a soon-to-be international rival in Johnny Sexton tomorrow, he will want to catch the Ireland selectors’ eyes. WITH Kieran Keane coming into replace Connacht’s title-winning coach Pat Lam, there have been a few teething problems in the early running this season.
Having won only one of their games to date, and that against the winless Southern Kings in Galway, the struggles have been well documented. But, despite ultimately losing the contest, their performance against Scarlets last week was certainly their best of the young campaign to date.
Much has changed from that 2016 fairytale journey to lifting the trophy in Edinburgh, with some big name departures — Robbie Henshaw, AJ MacGinty and Aly Muldowney in the main — but there are still plenty of threats.
Irish-qualified centre Bundee Aki has been hampered by a few injuries since that breakout campaign, but is getting a run in the westerners midfield, while winger Matt Healy is fit to join Tiernan O’Halloran and Cian Kelleher in the back-three. Connacht’s back-row is another unit disrupted by injury, with naturalised Kiwi Jake Heenan on the sidelines after injury.