Munster revive feeding-time-at-the-zoo days

The Wembley Stadium hoopla on Saturday evening was as far from a Thomond Park experience as you could possibly imagine

SO THE Heineken Cup comes along, kick-starts the 2010-’11 season into vibrant life for a couple of weeks and then, having given us a teaser of the even more absorbing dramas which will assuredly follow in December and January, goes into hiding again.

A little sip then of the heady brew that reaches other parts of the European rugby firmament that no other tournament does.

Time was when Southern Hemisphere imports into the European game would bemoan this constant interchanging between competitions; that the Heineken Cup should be run off en bloc a la the Super 14. With each passing year those complaints subside, and with good reason.

The structure of the Northern Hemisphere may be unwieldy but, akin to the European football season, it also adds to the intrigue. The Heineken Cup is probably the biggest beneficiary of the structure, for it would lose much of its lustre if the pool stages were run off in six successive weeks. You can get too much of a good thing.

It undoubtedly suits the Irish system, allowing more indigenous squads to regroup without flogging them to death while therefore also serving the greater master – Team Ireland. And Declan Kidney and his Brains Trust will be particularly grateful for the improved form of many of those home-grown players in recent weeks.

It’s worth stressing again that most of the front-liners now have more rugby under their belts than was the case a year ago and the squad of 34 or so announced today should suddenly look a little healthier, in terms of injury profile and form, than might have appeared a week or two ago.

This is thanks in the main to a dollop of what looked like vintage Munster when routing Toulon on Saturday. With much of the older guard restored, it was surely no coincidence that intelligence oozed from them for much of the 80 minutes.

With Mick O’Driscoll (has he ever played better?), Alan Quinlan and David Wallace back in harness, they varied their lineouts to ensure a solid platform of quality possession and, true to style, retain a capacity for sensing out a team’s weakness and exploiting it which few teams do better.

As on all their best days at Thomond Park, their lineout maul muscled out yardage aplenty. Against Leinster a fortnight before, when they went to the corner and cranked up their intensity, they rarely looked like scoring. On Saturday, in scoring four of their five tries from close range, it was like the old feeding-time-at-the-zoo days.

Against London Irish, in the first half especially, they had over-reacted to their conservatism against Leinster by going too wide too often but as in the second half at the Madejski, there was a better balance to their game. The suspension to Sam Tuitoupou may even have been a blessing in disguise. Well though Johne Murphy countered in Reading from fullback, there’s a better feel to Munster when there is also the kicking game of Paul Warwick on the pitch.

The biggest boon in the light of Tomás O’Leary’s unfortunate broken thumb has been the way Peter Stringer has slipped back into his old groove so seamlessly, and if anything has added more variety to his game, attacking the space around the fringes which Toulon surprisingly left vacant.

Needless to say he hasn’t missed a pass in the last couple of weeks and with that extra time on the ball, Ronan O’Gara has looked back to his imperious best. Given the crucial importance of quick ball in the modern game, and the need to rotate the troops for Ireland’s first November full hand of four Tests, Stringer looks set to win his first cap(s) next month since the North America tour in the summer of 2009.

Munster still have little elbow room in advance of their pivotal and potentially decisive meetings with the Ospreys, whereas Leinster’s excellent win over Saracens – coupled with Vern Cotter’s curious decision to rest many of his big guns for Clermont’s bonus-point defeat at Racing Metro – gives Joe Schmidt’s team more room for manoeuvre.

If Leinster come out of the back-to-back meetings against Clermont with any kind of superior head-to-head record they will be in the driving seat come the final two rounds in January.

Kidney and co will also be grateful that Cian Healy was granted a start and for the increasingly impressive performances of Nathan Hines, Devin Toner and Seán O’Brien, as well as more established stars such as Jamie Heaslip and Jonathan Sexton.

Despite again flattering to deceive, victory in their remaining four pool games ought still ensure that Ulster progress one way or another. Here again, at least the likes of Andrew Trimble and Stephen Ferris are ensuring some good form.

It was unfortunate for Ulster that they ran into a vintage Dimitri Yachvili and Biarritz, but even so their attempts to batter the Basques into submission – physically bullying tactics which have worked to a degree in the Magners League – have rarely looked so one-dimensional.

Similarly, Saracens looked utterly lacking in a Plan B when their straight-running, wide-wide game came undone against Leinster, and their coach, Brendan Venter, venting his spleen again, so to speak, could not disguise that.

He is also coming across as the man who cried wolf too often, and far from ignoring Venter the ERC and their referees’ performance manager, Donal Courtney, have been receptive to him or anybody else with feedback, positive or otherwise. In point of fact, the ERC only received Saracens’ DVD of their game away to Clermont a week before – supposedly highlighting 23 unpunished infringements by the French side – yesterday.

The Heineken Cup reached out to another new part on Saturday, namely Wembley, which is the 91st venue in the competition’s history and as far away from the opener in Romania between Farul Constanta and Toulouse as you are likely to get. From little acorns and all that.

There appears to have been a decidedly mixed reaction from some of the huge Leinster contingent who experienced all the Wembley hoopla.

The loud drum beating and constant serenading of the home fans was one thing, but going so far as to crank up the volume whenever Saracens went on the attack or, more objectionably, when ever Leinster supporters went into song, was quite another.

Whatever it is about the acoustics at Wembley, certainly around the press box according to English journalists who have frequented the ground previously, there is always a background noise. In any event, the constant din and hum made it feel like a cross between a baseball game and Last Night At the Proms (the latter is guesswork!).

It was funny to recall how Nigel Wray admitted to being blown away by the old-style rugby atmosphere at Thomond Park when Saracens called in there a decade ago.

This was as far from a Thomond Park experience as you could possibly imagine.