Potential for disaster has focused Munster minds, insists Kleyn
JEAN KLEYN and Munster know the stakes this weekend as they make the short hop to Barnet.
Beat Saracens and they put one foot in the European Champions Cup quarter-final, lose and they must beat Racing 92 in Paris to keep their hopes of a fourth successive trip to the knock-outs alive.
With Mark McCall due to recall most of his World Cup stars for the return fixture after last Saturday’s 10-3 reversal in Thomond Park, Munster are on guard for a backlash that could leave them in a perilous position.
That, Kleyn says, has sharpened minds this week as the Reds look to edge the head-tohead and keep their ambitions on track.
“With the European Cup, what I have learned over the last few years, it is very much about the home and away fixtures,” the second-row said.
“They have played us away and they took theirs and now we are playing them away and they are expecting to recoup the points here. It is down to us to keep them out of it now.
“Realistically speaking, they are only five points behind. If we slip up this weekend and we have a poor performance they can come right back in and we could end up third on the log, which is not something we plan on doing.
“Position-wise, we’re sitting in a fairly good place now but we still have a few very big matches ahead of us to close out the pool stages.
“Hopefully we can get the win and it will be a big win because if we win this week then Sarries effectively could be out of the running.
“It’s a big onus on us this weekend to perform and to have that 80-minute performance.”
That performance has been hard to come by given how Kleyn and his Ireland colleagues came back into a much-changed setup after Stephen Larkham and Graham Rowntree took over from Felix Jones and Jerry Flannery while they were away at the World Cup.
After a summer learning the Joe Schmidt way, Kleyn returned from Japan and had to study the new game-plan at provincial level. A month in, he says it’s clicking.
“It took me a few weeks, I have to say, to make the change over again,” he said.
“But we’re into it now. There’s a learning curve on everything, we have it fairly down now anyway. Now we can just put it into place and have a very good performance this week.”
IT seems reasonable enough to start with that kick, you know, the nerve-jangling one that rescued Ulster’s European season last Saturday. While Stuart McCloskey has admitted to taking the option of not looking as John Cooney lined up his long-range shot, with so little time left to play, Sean Reidy wasn’t for that.
When he saw the contact Reidy knew it looked like it had the legs and that his next move was to just get his head around the all-important restart.
With McCloskey’s evidently nervy disposition, it was just as well the centre who was awarded man of the match wasn’t actually watching as Cooney gathered himself to hit the ball towards the posts.
As Reidy explains, Ulster’s scrum-half had rather more to contend with than the intense pressure of knowing that this kick would not only edge Ulster in front, after battling back from being nine points behind, but probably also secure them a vital win from the first of the back-to-backs with Harlequins.
“I was (standing) right beside him,” the 30-year-old Kiwi said.
“The ball was actually moving with the wind and it nearly went off the tee and then he waited until the gust stopped.
“That was good and, yeah, I’ve got faith in him,” he added of Cooney’s accurate finish.
McCloskey now features again, though this time with more input than turning away from Cooney’s 78th minute strike.
The centre was the provider for Reidy’s first half try which, yet again, came from a piece of heads-up play via Billy Burns.
With a penalty coming Ulster’s way, Burns fired out a cross-kick over to McCloskey who caught the ball and drew the attention of two defenders, allowing the flanker take the off-load unmarked and with a run-in to score the home side’s initial try of the game.
So, a planned move or just heat of the moment stuff?
“It was just off the cuff. Billy does quite a lot of those cross-field kicks and us ‘loosies’ (back-rowers) find ourselves in the wide channels quite often so it was just by chance.
“I didn’t have to do anything really but just walk it over the line,” he recalls.
It was quite a game. Yet again, Ulster dug the result out, as has been pretty much the case in all three European games, and now lead the pool as they prepare to play at the
Stoop tomorrow.
Reidy put in another typically industrious shift last weekend and, so far, the two-times capped Ireland player has been involved in all 10 of Ulster’s games which demonstrates his overall value to head coach Dan McFarland even though there was no avoiding the fact that Ulster had it pretty tight up front.
Quins, had the game’s dominant forward in No.8 Alex Dombrandt, though Chris Robshaw wasn’t too far behind in that regard, and the province’s breakdown work was nowhere near as effective as it ought to have been.
Reidy doesn’t attempt to