Deep thinker prepares to dig deeper

Failing to make the knockout stages last year hurt Munster but Gerry Thornleyfinds Paul O'Connell in a positive frame of mind for this year's campaign.

IN THE build-up to last Friday’s latest rendezvous with Leinster, Paul O’Connell had said the fixture would tell Munster everything they needed to know about themselves before they returned to European matters next weekend. Amid the disappointment of defeat, O’Connell believes there were plenty of positives for Munster to take from the game.

Beginning with the game’s finale, as it were, the most encouraging aspect was their surge in the final quarter which yielded the game’s only try, albeit a penalty try. “I was very happy with the way we finished the game and our levels of finish. Our set scrum was good too.”

Leinster had looked marginally the more likely to score a try throughout the penalty-riddled arm wrestle, but O’Connell was not especially concerned about that. “You are looking at a very good Leinster team who are very good defensively, and they’re hard to break down, so I don’t see that as a big issue.”

O’Connell’s biggest concern was Munster’s ill-discipline, which afforded Jonathan Sexton seven successful penalties at goal. “In the end, it was down to us, and certainly if we play like we did in the first half against Northampton, we will be in trouble.”

And therein lies the rub, for O’Connell and Munster would have gladly exchanged a defeat last Friday for two wins over the next couple of Saturdays, daunting as that task is against last year’s beaten finalists Northampton, and high-flying Castres in Toulouse.

Munster have had fully 10 months to digest their first exit at the pool stages since the 1997-98 season, and not that they would have needed it, but all the launches, interviews, media days and previews of this season’s tournament have helped to jog the memory.

“Yeah, it probably was a timely reminder and the disappointment of it and I suppose, whatever about going (out), some of the performances and the way we performed some times was just disappointing.”

The hurt hasn’t gone away. To qualify for the knockout stages for 12 successive seasons is quite possibly a sequence that will never be equalled, but it left them victims of their own high standards and all that.

“Definitely. Every team will go through a transition or whatever but you’ve got to make sure no matter who’s on the field that you’re emptying the tank and being dogged for everything we can get, and maybe at times last year we didn’t do that.”

As captain, O’Connell carries the demands established by that legacy, the pain of last season’s “failure” and the desire for atonement, so in that sense reviving a few old wounds from last season may be no harm, although he says he’s not sure yet whether he needs to revisit this theme with his team-mates.

“I don’t really know. I think a lot of guys will be conscious of it,” he says, citing the many changes from last season, and adds: “This will be the second of back-to-back games against last season’s two Heineken Cup finalists, and then we have Castres away who were unbeaten at home until the week before last and are flying high in the Top 14, and they look to have a massive pack from the little bit I saw of them at the weekend.”

Munster have always drawn heavily from their umbilical link with their supporters, who have spent fortunes travelling around Europe supporting them. Admittedly, they’ve had plenty of parties and highs along the way, and by rights Munster owe them or the rest of us nothing. To a degree, O’Connell suggests, now is when Munster need their supporters more than ever.

“Last year was disappointing but I think it’s important that the supporters stick with us as well though, you know? There’s no doubt that we have to dig deep in the next few weeks and I think it’s important that they dig deep for us as well in terms of being there with an atmosphere. We really need that. But absolutely, we probably owe them one from last year.”

Invariably, on foot of Munster’s Heineken Cup exit and Ireland’s departure from the World Cup, there’s been much talk of eras or cycles ending. Raise this question and O’Connell reveals both some of his hopes and doubts for the future.

He points to Seán O’Brien’s emergence after Jamie Heaslip and Stephen Ferris, along with Conor Murray and latterly Mike Sherry and Peter O’Mahony at Munster to support his real belief that there are “phenomenal players coming through and are already there for Ireland”.

“So while it is the end of an era a little bit in that certain players are moving on, but for me, the only thing about losing those guys, the like of the Foleys, the Hayes, the Quinnys, is that you lose their mentality more than anything. That’s just the only thing I look to see.

“I think that most of the guys coming through from being in the academies all have skill levels and all that, and they’re all big men. The big thing you wonder is: are they going to have the mentality of those guys? The Hayes, the Quinnys and the Foleys; the doggedness, the belligerence, this mentality that they’d fight with you over a toothpick on Monday, y’know, this kind of attitude. That’s the only thing I wonder sometimes.”

Analyse this a tad more, and the concern might grow, for the Foleys, Quinlans, Hayes and co cut their teeth, in large part, in the hard school of the All-Ireland League – O’Connell with Young Munster included.

“Yeah, maybe that did come from there,” he concedes. “I was at Young Munster-Shannon the other day and there was 2,000 at it. Munsters had a man sent off wrongly after half an hour,” he says, and spoken like a true “Munsters” man, “but they won the game. Now, it was a typical Limerick derby, in that if they were still playing, there probably still wouldn’t have been a try but it was dogged and as physical as anything you’ll see.

“That’s still there, but I think it’s all about the attitude. Young guys coming in are, as I said, they’re big, they’re strong, they’re able to play ball. But what set those guys apart and what set Munster on the run to success was those guys’ mental attitude and their mental strength. If they came across a guy that was better than them, they’d figure a way to beat them. That remains to be seen in the young guys coming through.”

Should these young players be exposed to more AIL rugby than they are. “I don’t know would it give them as it gave us back then. But it’s all mental. Rugby is an emotional game and it’s about mental strength, and the young guys who come through with that will be successful, and the guys who don’t have it won’t be.”

O’Connell has always been a deep thinker about the game, and 32 later this month, he is perhaps more thoughtful than ever. He says he returned from the World Cup feeling as drained and defeated as he did after the Lions’ tour. “I think World Cups and Lions tours are probably the ‘forever moments’ if you can be successful in them, and we left the Lions’ tour in 2009 behind and probably now we’ve left a World Cup behind.”

Thankfully though, there are some key differences. For starters, after a brief holiday, he had the added distraction and incentive of leading Munster into the Heineken Cup campaign. O’Connell will be 35 at the next World Cup, and while the odds are against him making it to England, he’s not ruling it out. “I’m enjoying training; I’m enjoying everything about rugby at the moment, probably more than ever,” he reveals, which is good to hear. “I dunno. I don’t know where I’ll be in four years but at the moment I’m enjoying it and I’m keeping going.

“Maybe it’s because it’s coming towards the end and what’s after the end is going to be nothing like as enjoyable as hanging around with 30 lads who are your closest mates, and training hard, and trying to achieve something and having a major involvement in every decision and everything we do it’s good as it gets really. And to be living at home as well, to be a professional sports person living 10 minutes from home, and still be able to hang around with your friends, not a lot of Irish people get to do it.”

Of his three World Cups, the 2011 version will always be the one that got away, though he maintains that the defeat to Wales was in no way due to the Irish squad getting ahead of themselves. Yet despite the anti-climactic nature of that World Cup, O’Connell will still have fond memories of it and, on reflection, feels that, in being able to view it as a missed opportunity, maybe a barrier was overcome. To begin with, in the immediate aftermath of the laboured opening win over the USA, he privately worried as to whether Ireland were doomed to having a permanent hang-up about the World Cup.

“Nearly the opposite to Argentina, who go to World Cups and grow, I thought ‘are we going to go to World Cups and shrink?’ I was a bit worried about that, but I think now whatever Irish team goes to the next World Cup they’ll go there with a lot of belief knowing that the team of 2011 had a great chance to win it, and probably could have won it. It’ll help give Irish teams belief.”

Furthermore, he’s feeling fit and healthier than he has done in a couple of years following on from his well-documented groin problems which ruined much of the last two seasons.

“I’ve just come off the back of a horrible year and a half injury wise. I mean I played some games toward the end of last season when I didn’t feel physically right. There were times during some games when I wanted the ground to swallow me up I felt so bad. I’m enjoying now feeling close to the shape I need to be in to play games, whereas last year there were times, with no pre-season, and I’d just come off the back of an infection, it’s not that I wasn’t enjoying the rugby, I just wasn’t in the shape I needed to be in to make the kind of impact I like to be able to make.

“It’s a tough thing in a rugby career that you end up playing a lot of the time not in the shape you want to be in. There’s very few of us playing 100 per cent fit, I’d say there’s no one playing 100 per cent at the moment, and that’s the challenge of it. You need to be able to get out there and perform when you’re not 100 per cent right. All those little bits are what make it hard and make it good as well.

“There’s plenty left in the tank for a lot of the players,” he maintains, and that evidently includes himself.