Munster’s remarkable progress is the story

SPORT, like life, is a fleeting, fickle thing. One minute you’re up. The next you’re down. On small things do fortunes turn. Single games. The form of a star player. That ineffable quality of when it clicks for an individual or for a group.

Often, once it does click, it’s hard to remember what it was like before. As Munster’s season progressed that has certainly seems to have been the case. It all felt so natural, so familiar, as if the world was righting itself.

Now that, all of a sudden, Munster are box-office again memories of the no so distant past have tended to fade. Munster are box-office... of course they are, haven’t they always been?

Not quite. It was grim enough there for a couple of seasons. The drumbeat was one of the decline and fall of a great empire. Each data point and set-back contrasted with the days of yore, a time of famine contrasted with an earlier time of plenty, literally so when it came to attendances and finances.

If anything is going to get under the skin of a group of players it’s that, the constant comparisons, unfavourable, often times unflattering comparisons with the good old days and the good old boys.

In the two seasons before this one, the burden seemed too great for this set of Munster players. They weren’t so much standing on the shoulders of giants as being trodden upon by those said same giants.

It’s one thing to be part of a continuum, it’s quite another to be cast in the shadow of others. A team needs to build its own identity, respectful of its heritage, just not beholden to it to the extent that it suffocates.

This year Munster have started to breathe again. They’ve opened their lungs and thrown back their shoulders. Confidence surging through them, they’ve discovered or rediscovered what it is to be themselves.

Through it all they’ve been as much Munster as they’ve been themselves. The balance struck has been a healthy one. The bullish, underdog belligerence, the scrap and the bottle, that’s all classic Munster.

At times too there was a swagger. This was Zebo’s Munster. This was Earls’ Munster and Murray’s Munster. This was and is something new, something that portends a bright future to go along with that glorious past.

Even after last weekend that bright future remains well within reach. Disappointing is it was, defeat to Saracens changed nothing in that regard. The very act of getting to a Champions Cup semi-final was hugely significant in the development of this Munster side.

The defeat they suffered in it is just another step on the road, another lesson to be learned. Besides it wouldn’t be Munster if it wasn’t a battle, if there weren’t set-backs along the way to success.

Fans shouldn’t be – and to be fair weren’t – too disheartened by what Saracens did to Munster in Lansdowne Road. The English side are, after all, the reigning champions and favourites to retain their title.

Saracens, then, are a side reaching the peak of their developmental cycle and Munster are a side right at the beginning. It’s easy to look back now with the benefit of hindsight and say that a victory was never on cards, but that does appear the logical conclusion.

Being Munster, of course, is something beyond pure logic. It’s hope and belief. It’s fans out-numbering the opposition. It’s taking foreign fields and turning them, for the eighty minutes of the match, into colonies of Munster red. Lansdowne Road rocked to a familiar rhythm,

Stand Up and Fight, The Fields, a crowd of thousands and thousands of Munster men and women urged their men forwards to battle.

On this occasion it wasn’t enough to provide that spark or light the fuse. The difference in class and experience was too much for the sixteenth man to bridge. The loss of Conor Murray to injury was simply too great for Munster to overcome.

Even had the Patrickswell man been on the pitch it’s unlikely to have been enough, but it would have given the Munster men a fighting chance. As it was Munster suffered badly for want of an effective half-back partnership.

Duncan Williams has done well at times this term, he just wasn’t at the required standard against a side of Saracens ability. Added to that Tyler Bleyendaal chose the worst possible moment to have his most disappointing game of the campaign.

With neither the nine nor the ten purring, Munster’s backs were largely reduced to a defensive role (Zebo did, of course, take the battle to Sarries in his own inimitable style) and Munster on the attack were hugely one-dimensional.

The game-plan, it’s fair to say, was flawed, even considering Rassie Erasmus was hamstrung by injuries to a couple of key players. Still we come back to the point that this is year one of a three year cycle for Munster.

Erasmus has unofficially let it be known that he’s going to see out his three year contract and for Munster it’s vital that he does. The last thing the team needs now is for a new coaching team to come on board and reset the clock all over again.

Munster need stability and continuity, time and patience. Give them that and the sky’s the limit.