Munster's Tribe have earned their right to swarm

A supporter's viewpoint:  Former Irish Times journalist and lifelong Munster fan Niall Kiely says the Red Army marches on long tradition. And don't forget about Cork

Much has been made - mostly by the Pale's living dead supporters and their apologists - about how new all this Munster stuff is.

Those who make the effort to produce evidence cite poor attendances at interprovincial games of yore. They may point out occasional, less-than-full venues when touring teams visited. Some even point out that it was not hard to get tickets for the Alone It Stands match in 1978.

They miss the point. That was then, an altogether different set of eras. An innocent game, and organised in a drastically different way. Socioeconomic times unrecognisable now, in a State a sea-change away from what it has become in the blurry decade since the mid-1990s.

Those old interpros? Mick English, one of the shining lights of Ireland and Munster rugby in the 1950s and 1960s, remembers the small knots of diehard spectators. "And your family might turn up if it was your first cap, that sort of thing," he said this week. "There was no Red Blanket then."

I was one of the diehards, in Musgrave Park and in Thomond. We travelled "away" only to Ireland games in Dublin. Very rarely, because it was costly, did we get to Edinburgh, Cardiff or London.

Connacht drew small numbers, Ulster got a few more as novelty value and the presence of internationals. The Leinstermen were the prime attraction, for reasons mostly atavistic and entirely visceral, and also to view their internationals: would they stand comparison against our undervalued heroes?

Sometimes they stood out, and the knowledgeable terraces saluted that. But often, our dark suspicions were confirmed about well-got flash Harrys and one-cap wonders whose elevation to the national team defied rational explanation.

We fell back on the obvious. Ulster and Leinster had two selectors apiece, we had one; and poor Connacht had none. We saw political selections, provincial numbers-games and a culture of keeping-Ulster-onside. RTÉ's hapless coverage was self-satisfied, and fed our parochial feelings of isolation.

Suspicion, annoyance, paranoia, distance from the metropolitan centre of things: they all helped to set the scene for the march to Cardiff.

Of the touring teams, two countries helped forge part of today's collective memory. The Australians of 1967, beaten in the windswept wasteland of Musser by a team led by the ultimate cute rugby hoor Tom Kiernan. The dour Kiwis of Grizz Wylie, who escaped with a draw from Cork in 1973. The All Blacks, again, hustled offstage gloriously in 78 at Thomond's grim theatre - again, courtesy of the grey fox, then manager, Kiernan. The Ella-brothers Aussies, beaten in 1981. And a decade later Munster again beat Wallaby tourists - in Cork, again.

These were the early, necessary milestones on the road to Cardiff 2006. And many of the wins came not in fortress Thomond, but in Cork - whose rugby roots and cross-sport support tends to get a wee bit lost in the more facile and seductive context of Limerick.

In fact, useful parallels can be drawn between this Munster phenomenon and the Cork hurlers (not least that half of their respective cohorts are much disregarded: the hurling forwards, the rugby three-quarters).

Two clever and unpretentious managers in Declan Kidney and John Allen; solid, effective back-up structures; a tradition decades old, burnished by recent excellence that sustains players, cognoscenti and aficionados; clear playing systems and tactical applications; and a hard-wired determination and collective will that squeezes the last, sweet drop out of sustained pressure and skills honed to a cutting edge. Preparation, prep and more prep.

A couple of vignettes.

Donie O'Grady paid tribute to the prep work of his successor, Allen, when he said the best point scored last season was one worked directly from a penalty saved by Donal Óg Cusack. Not a second of it accidental: practised and polished in training.

Cue the week of the Leinster-Munster semi-final in Lansdowne. Kidney studies the rules, finds Leinster have earned only home-country, not home-ground status. He requests, doubtless with that tight smile of his, a coin-flip for the "home" dressing-room. He wins. The Leinster boys are put out. Some are seriously pissed off. That didn't happen by accident either.

It doesn't matter that many of the Bank of Ireland/Toyota- wearing supporters of New Munster didn't serve their time on the terraces of history. It's irrelevant that most didn't suffer the purgatory of 3-0 interpros in the train-two-nights-a-week amateur days. It has no bearing on the here and now that they never experienced having their Final Trial expenses queried by an IRFU secretary, who opened a letter to Mick: "Dear English, this claim is overcooked . . ."

But all of that and more has passed into the folklore of this Munster Tribe, into a collective memory, a gestalt of appreciation of what the organisation, the players and the supporters now represent. It has been burnished and broadened by tales from the campfires and watering holes of Britain and Europe. It is an organic, live and pulsing thing.

Today is but the latest halting place for our caravanserai. Our hordes will have cognac in their bellies, iced water in their brains.

Pauvre Biarritz.