Ten years since last European title, are Munster now lost in transition?

Reds have remained competitive in the last decade without ever convincing that they can replicate those heady successes

TRANSITION is a dirty word in any sport. It smacks of an excuse culture. Of a desire to offset blame for current failures by lamenting a golden past and the vague anticipation of an even brighter future.

And it eases the pain of the present moment when a team isn’t winning silverware that they used to in the past and like they’d hope to in the future.

The enemy of transition is not merely uncertainty, but fear too. Not just the fear of winning. But the fear, as again expressed by Munster captain Peter O’Mahony (right) this week, of not losing.

Because it hurts too much, reminds you of the growing distance between the last time it didn’t hurt, and the inevitability that the pain will happen again sooner than you want.

The uncertainty derives from the reality that, with every year that goes by without a team winning a trophy, the next one seems to grow ever more distant.

WINLESS

Few outfits can definitively translate transition readily into transformation.

When Ireland failed to win any of the first three matches of their Six Nations campaign in 2016, the tournament immediately following their scarring World Cup exit to Argentina, even

Joe Schmidt, normally not so revealing of his innermost fears or uncertainties, mentioned the ‘T’ word.

A little over two years later, his side would follow a historic victory against the All Blacks, and a maiden Test win on South African soil, with a third Grand Slam in Irish history.

It can happen but then again Schmidt, already a serial winner with not just Ireland and Leinster, had not just a ready-made set of tools but more of them, not to mention his status as a master coach.

The truth of the 2016 Ireland in transition, as brief as a period as it may have been, was that they simply weren’t good enough.

And so, if it holds true for that team, it does so for Munster too. Except their longueur has lasted for an extended period if judged in the only currency in which the modern professional demands payment – silverware.

Ten years since a European trophy. Seven since their last league title. That’s a long time to be scratching the same itch.

That yawning anxiety is revisited in weeks like this, for players and supporters alike. Meeting Peter O’Mahony this week is almost an exercise in therapeutic counselling rather than sports hackery.

Past failures are dredged up as a bulwark against a foreboding future. Monday begins with a whisper in order that Saturday will end with a scream.

Even amongst the supporters, there is absolute faith in the team and what they represent but not necessarily total conviction that all will go well on the day. Compared to when Munster dominated Europe a decade ago, their hope and expectation is far less tinged with that raging will that toppled mountains but rather a grudging acceptance of their reduced status in the foothills. Turbulence has replaced triumph; tragedy, too, has filled that unwanted space. When Ian Keatley spoke this week, his almost throwaway comment about the fact that he has had five head coaches in recent times amplified the constant challenges that the squad have faced off the field, never mind on it.

These difficulties have been combined with the obvious reality that Munster have not been able to assemble a side worthy of emulating those 2006 and 2008 winners for a variety of reasons.

It was as if Munster spent so many years chasing their Odyssean quest for success that, when it eventually arrived in that gilded three-year period, they failed to prepare the necessary groundwork to continue it.

We remember putting this very point to a senior player in the 201011 season when, for the first time in 13 years, Munster failed to emerge from their six-game qualification pool and were relegated instead to Europe’s second tier.

Why hadn’t Munster begun a process of transition while successful?

EMERGED

The response that came back was that when the senior players looked around them, there weren’t players good enough to take their places. And that search has, it seems, continued ever since.

Key players have emerged, world-class in their positions – a Lions captain, the best scrum-half in the world, an indomitable spirit at the base of the scrum.

But the sum of the individual parts has failed to mould itself into a greater whole.

And so they wait.

Conor Murray, gilded in green, remains unfulfilled, for the most part, in red, aside from a Celtic League in his debut season.

“Ten years,” he said this week, as if at once surprised and appalled by the advancing time.

“The history of Munster is linked to this competition, so we obviously know that this is the tenth anniversary of the last European title of Munster.

“And it makes us even more hungry. Since then, the club has changed a lot. Be it the staff, the players, the training centre.

“So we want to write our own story.

“This season, we have an experienced team, made up of good players but also young players with good qualities, who should have their chance.”

It has been a well-worn theme but the talk has only fitfully translated into action at the business end of a season for Munster.

For a variety of reasons – a slowing quality of emerging Academy players who are ready to play, erratic recruitment, staccato advancement because of coaching changes – Munster haven’t been able to kick on to the next level.

True, they have sustained their competitiveness with regular appearances in the knockout stages of both domestic and European competition but, just as it has never appeared that they have ever reached a nadir, the summit of their ambitions remains just as elusive.

Only one thing can transform this state of mind and the status of the squad. Winning.

Munster Rugby has always scoffed at the notion of transition, whether it was Ronan O’Gara or Anthony Foley, yet outsiders, such as Rob Penney, were never slow to mention the dirty word.

Yet he was ultimately undone by an impatience amongst supporters and his own squad at the methods he sought to deploy to negotiate the change and ended up leaving a year ahead of schedule. The reversion to home-grown coaches, and the more traditional style that had previously brought success to the club, sadly never materialised either.

We will never know whether the alliance of Rassie Erasmus and Foley, similar to that now being spawned by another young coach and an experienced overseas hand at Leinster, might have ultimately borne fruit for Munster.

The pain of Foley’s loss cannot be underestimated in this squad’s inability to reach the heady heights of yesteryear.

Last summer, the squad introspectively examined the limits of a stylistic approach that undermined their twin title challenge and promised to address them this season.

But the departure of Erasmus, and his apparent ease in allowing Johann van Graan to leave South Africa, stalled the momentum once more.

And so Munster continue the process of re-invention and renewal.

And still there is a feeling that, even though they may be just be three games away from winning another European title, they might well be as far away from it as at any time in the last 10 years.

“I’ve never been involved in a Munster team that has been in transition,” Foley told us a few years back. “We get more competitive and we win trophies.”

Winning today might move them closer to that cherished aim.