IT WAS A CRUEL AND HUMILIATING WAY FOR DONNACHA RYAN TO LEAVE
DONNACHA RYAN stood and shook hands with every player in the Scarlets squad. He embraced his team-mates, and then walked towards the tunnel as the stage was constructed for the trophy presentation.
His long service to Munster ended with a humiliating defeat for his team. A season of substantial improvement for the province ended with a hiding.
The oafish self-regard that drove John Terry to choreograph his Chelsea farewell is one extreme, but Ryan was forced to submit to the other. His 167th appearance for Munster was also his last, before a move to Racing in Paris for next season.
He wore the No4 shirt, and with half an hour gone he might have wondered if the Terry approach had its merits. The soccer player left after 26 minutes of his last match as that was also his jersey number.
Had Ryan pursued that exit strategy, he could have been back in the dressing room before losing much sweat, and before his team fell apart.
Munster had the best defence in Europe for most of the season, but they were undone with a cruel brilliance by the Welsh time and again. Tackles were missed; players zoomed out of the defensive line heedless of the consequences.
For much of the game every Scarlets move forward, no matter the scale of its ambition, promised a rich dividend.
The expectation was Munster would harness the conditions to their cause and make the pitch tight and the match bruising. It had rained most of the night and much of the day in Dublin, stopping not long before kick-off.
Given the way the Scarlets have played on two visits to Ireland in eight days, this match could have been fixed for a lunar crater and it wouldn’t have checked them. They play terrific rugby, based on the reasonable tactic of winning the breakdown and moving the ball wide as quickly as possible.
It befuddled Munster, and left their supporters stunned to silence. There were no more than a few hundred Scarlets fans in the ground, but they were responsible for the noise until Tyler Bleyendaal scored Munster’s first try before halftime.
That drew a desperate cheer, but the reality of a 19-point margin tempered the bravado.
Leinster were 16 points behind Northampton in the 2011 European Cup final before famously rebounding to win the trophy, but that miracle depended on both an opposition collapse and a chasing side with the ability to execute their skills repeatedly under great pressure.
That was a marvellous Leinster side, tempered in winning and who barely made a mistake in that match.
Munster are two years and as many as five players away from that level. They understood the urgency of their situation on the resumption here, but they made mistakes, allowing the Scarlets to score the first points of the second half through a Rhys Patchell penalty.
Munster did not have the mobility or the accuracy to compete at the breakdown, in particular, and as the match wore on there was no sign of the visiting team loosening their hold on the contest.
Peter O’Mahony was one of the Munster players thoroughly outplayed, with James Davies and Aaron Shingler magnificent in the Scarlets back row. O’Mahony’s frustration blistered into indiscipline with 25 minutes remaining when dropping his shoulder into the back of Davies.
Had he been banished to the sin bin by referee Nigel Owens, O’Mahony could not have argued. He wasn’t, and it was punishment for him to stay on the field and scramble in futility after a clearly superior team.
With as much as a quarter of the game left and the Scarlets 22 points in front, the competitive element of the occasion had burned out. Munster’s inspirations had been shut down, CJ Stander felled as expertly by this team as he had been by Saracens in the European Cup at this venue last month.
Simon Zebo tried manfully to introduce unpredictability into his team’s game, but to no lasting effect. Conor Murray offered leadership but Munster could not withstand the surges of quality that swept over them.
With Ryan moving to France, Munster’s stock of Test-class players is further reduced. It is speculated that Rassie Erasmus is employing the extensive contacts he enjoys in his homeland to bring over a South African lock.
Meanwhile, the fourth Scarlets try here was scored by Tadhg Beirne. The 24-year-old is from Eadestown in Kildare and moved to Wales this season after injuries handicapped his attempts to break through in a meaningful way at Leinster.
Scarlets, Wales and Lions hooker Ken Owens suggested this week that Beirne will be a contender for their player of the season. Given the shortage of quality locks in Ireland – with Ryan gone, the national team is one injury away from a crisis in the position – repatriating him and moving him to Thomond Park would make good sense. Beirne may be reluctant to leave his current team, however, as the Scarlets are an excellent side. They moved from dominant to rampant 10 minutes from time when replacement DTH van der Merwe scored their fifth try.
Munster were humiliated. Their supporters took the score as their signal for home. Small, voluble pockets of Scarlets support sang ‘Bread of Heaven’ and, it seemed, every other tune in the exhaustive, exhausting Welsh songbook.
Andrew Conway and Keith Earls streaked over for late Munster scores, but there was no consolation. They were torn asunder.