O’Mahony says Munster must do better as he backs Kleyn’s Ireland claims

WHETHER deliberate or not, Munster got their good news in early this week by announcing Jean Kleyn’s new three-year deal.

Moving the conversation on from Friday’s abject performance in Cardiff was vital for a province who go into the interpros with questionmarks over their form.

Capturing Kleyn until 2022 is a shrewd piece of business as Johann van Graan looks to build a team capable of taking the next step.

And it opens the door for the South African to represent Ireland at next year’s World Cup after he qualifies on residency in September next year.

“Jean has a great way of going about his work, he’s a very diligent man, he works hard and keeps the head down and he’s very, very effective in what he does and he knows what he’s very good at and works hard at it,” Ireland flanker and Munster captain Peter O’Mahony said of the second-row.

“I’ve no doubt that if he continues the way he has been performing at the moment, taking his form from last year into this season, I’ve no doubt that he’ll be banging on the right doors.

“But he’ll know himself that performance is key – consistency of performance. And he knows that better than anyone.”

Agenda

Head coach Van Graan said the 25-year-old’s international prospects did not feature much in the discussions between the province and the player, but conceded that playing for Ireland is certainly on Kleyn’s agenda.

“I think obviously he will strive to play international rugby but that’s not in my control,” he said. “The only thing I can do is try to make people happy at Munster and at this stage I think we’ve got a very happy squad.

“You can ask the players about that but people want to be part of our club and our club stands for certain values, and he fits into those values so it’s great to have him at our club.”

Although they were on duty for the Champions Cup launch at the Aviva Stadium yesterday, the primary focus for the Reds this week is fixing what went wrong at the Cardiff Arms Park last Friday.

First and foremost, they’ll be looking at their defensive effort after missing 20 tackles on the way to conceding four tries.

“You can only worry about your process and your performance. You’d like to think that if you put in an 80-minute performance with the calibre of players that we’ve got now, then we should be winning games,” O’Mahony said.

“So that’s our focus. If we get anything like the performance we should be getting, we should be beating teams. It starts with your defence and it’s something that let us down massively last weekend.”