O'Connell and company aiming to scale new peaks

HEINEKEN CUP POOL ONE NORTHAMPTON v MUNSTER: PAUL O'CONNELL could surely have done without this. Coming so soon after the heightened focus on his leadership on the Lions tour, seasonal starts are supposed to be gentler than this. Instead, another defeat – coming on the heels of last week – would spark talk of a crisis and perhaps even prompt doubts within.

And with the prospect of a trek to the Catalonian fortress that is Perpignan’s Stade Aime Giral in round four in December, already the odds of 4 to 1 favourites on Munster to lift a third Heineken Cup in five years would look faintly ridiculous. Of course, Munster, with their inbuilt qualification radar, will know this better than anyone.

Taking a time-out during last Monday’s Heineken Cup launch in the Shelbourne Hotel, O’Connell – in full Munster regalia for the preceding photo-shoot – appears serenely relaxed. Outside, the sun is caressing the autumnal leaves in St Stephen’s Green.

If the Lions experience has made him a better captain it’s time to start demonstrating this already though, as O’Connell himself maintains, it’s Munster’s Heineken Cup mindset in a week when they are wounded which will mean he won’t have to crack the whip at all.

Even so, Munster fans were simply stunned by the scale of the defeat and the limpness of their heroes’ performance last Saturday. As the first day of the AIL began, one can only imagine what the discussions were like in the clubhouses of Limerick, Cork and elsewhere in the province. They would have felt let down.

“There’s no doubt about it, and I wouldn’t feel insulted by you saying that. Yeah, there is no doubt about it. We let ourselves down first and foremost, which I think would be our main responsibility, but yeah, definitely let the supporters down.”

Whatever else, everyone expected Munster to come up to Dublin still smarting, sore, wounded and vengeful from the events of early May in Croke Park, which made the lack of intensity all the more surprising. As Mick Galwey once put it, “nobody beats Munster twice”, ie in a row.

“It’s something that I’m asking myself as well, the same question,” O’Connell admitted with disarming honesty.

“It’s a good question, and one I probably don’t have the answer for at the moment.”

Then there’s O’Connell himself. As much as his innate honesty and drive off the pitch makes him a natural man to follow into the trenches, he is also a leader from the front.

Unlike Brian O’Driscoll, and let’s face it, everybody is unlike O’Driscoll, the Munster and Lions captain needs games, a good few of them, to start hitting his optimum level of all-action, dynamic performance.

“It’s not ideal. Two games going into a Heineken Cup is very tough. It’s not ideal,” he repeats, before turning the question away, “and then if you throw in a few injuries like we’ve had with Wally, Flah, Paul Warwick, Quinnie – it’s not ideal. But that’s it, that’s what we’ve got and our strength is in our squad.

“That was our strength last year and it has been for the last few years, we’ve just got to get on with it. Our results are written. No one is going to write down our stop-start beginning to the season so no one really cares, and we shouldn’t either. We’ve just got to go out there and do it.”

You wonder too at the Munster mindset when figuratively, and literally so in the case of O’Connell and Tony McGahan last Monday at the Irish Heineken Cup launch in the Shelbourne Hotel, their Leinster counterparts are sitting alongside them as European champions.

More new territory.

“It’s tough to take, but you look at the way they’re doing things, the way they played the other night. They’re setting the standards in everything they do, in their defence, their attack, their kicking game, their breakdown, their set-piece – they’re setting the standard and we’ve to catch up to it,” admitted O’Connell candidly, and that must be the first time any Munster captain in history has said that.

The ex-Munster player turned pundit, John Kelly, recently admitted that he had mixed feelings watching Leinster take on Leicester in the final in Murrayfield, though by the end he was rooting for his erstwhile provincial opponents and Irish team-mates.

“There would have been mixed feelings alright,” agrees O’Connell. “We wanted to be there, and sometimes you don’t want your arch rivals winning it but then you look at some guys like Mal O’Kelly especially – I suppose because he’s in my position – picking up a Heineken Cup. I know, after 2006, that would have been unbelievable for him. So yeah, I have a lot of friends on the team and I was happy for them.”

He also stresses how much the various Irish successes of last season underlined new-found levels of confidence, and backboned “a big contribution to the Lions tour”.

O’Connell had, assuredly the most high-pressured, intense summer of his career in the goldfish bowl that is being the Lions captain. It comes as no surprise to learn that the disappointment of losing the Test series has scarcely dimmed even with the passage of time.

“Ah, I’ve still got regrets about it really. We were good enough to win it. I think that with all the players coming together there’s no doubt you have the talent individually to win it. The big challenge then is trying to be a team.

“Even though lineout systems, defensive systems, attacking systems, everything, have become so much more complicated, it’s very hard to get on the same wavelength as someone in such a short period of time, but yet we have less time to come together than the old amateur teams did.

“Credit must go to the players but also to the coaches, for the way they managed the tour and the way they coached the tour. They kept it simple, we played a game plan that we could all pick up very quickly and by the time the Test series came along we were a team playing as a team, playing for each other and playing a game plan that we all knew.

“That’s why we were so competitive. It was a highly pressured tour, a tough tour. It was like playing a Heineken Cup final every week, but, looking back on it, it was very enjoyable.”

A small section of the British media – so pally with Ian McGeechan that most of the questions aimed at the head coach began with him being addressed ’Geech – were evidently waiting in the long grass for the Irish skipper.

“My friends back home would have been telling me about stuff. It was all part of it. I wouldn’t say it didn’t get to me. I’d say I was conscious of it and I’d rather it wasn’t happening.

“But there’s plenty of people in that situation. It’s hard to enjoy in some ways but in other ways you realise you’re enjoying it more than anything else because you’re really out of your comfort zone, you’re really pushing yourself.

“You could be there on a supporters’ trip sometimes enjoying yourself, but you’re there in the front line. Sometimes you get shot at but that’s part of it, and when you win it’s the best feeling in the world, as I’ve been lucky enough to do with Munster and Ireland down through the years. But when you lose it’s tough as well, as we did on the Lions tour.”

Martyn Williams said O’Connell was the best captain he ever played under.

“That’s a nice compliment,” says O’Connell a tad sheepishly, though perhaps grateful that the likes of Williams, Mike Phillips and Jamie Roberts, unprovoked, substantiated the praise for the Lions’ captain’s leadership from all the Irish players as well. It also came from a player that he respects hugely.

“I think some guys have been on Lions tours and there’s been so much hype about Lions tours and the experience it’s supposed to be – and I had been on the Lions tour of 2005 and some guys had been on the tour of 2001 – and it was probably a bit of a let-down and a bit of a disappointment for them.

“But I think this really was an enjoyable tour. And for a lot of supporters and media people it restored their faith in Lions tours. And for a lot of players who’d been on previous Lions tours, it restored their faith as well.

“Obviously the privilege it is but how enjoyable it can be as well, and I suppose how much of a thing you remember for life and treasure for life. For a lot of us, that’s what it was.”

A privilege, enjoyable and a treasure for life, but also the most draining experience a player could have as well, especially for the captain. Never must a four-week holiday have been so badly needed or enjoyable either.

“I was tired but I came though last year and it was my most injury-free season of my career which was unusual. I had bangs and knocks and all that, but I came though it fine. I dunno, I enjoyed my break but by the end of the four weeks I was mad to get back training.”

The man’s bonkers, or at any rate is certifiably addicted to rugby. Never have the current generation of frontliners come back so sated from their achievements of the previous season either. Thus far, unusually, the hunger has been far more evident in the Leinster camp, but O’Connell maintains he and his team-mates begin a season with the same hunger he always had.

“We’re very lucky with the tradition we have down below in Munster. There’s always new ideas there and exciting stuff there. The only regret is that we didn’t get to enjoy the Grand Slam a bit more.

“I wouldn’t say dine out on it, but we had a week there when we could have spent more time together I think and really taken pleasure out of it. I have memories of that night and the night after but after that we were back training and that’s the way it is because it was at that stage of the season. But I suppose it’s very hard to win things and to get to the stage where after all the years of getting it wrong you finally learn from it and you get it right, you probably don’t get to enjoy it as much as you should . That’s probably the only regret.”

Still lots more to win though.