'Our hearts go out to him and his family'

MUNSTER WERE holding their breath and awaiting the news of an X-ray on Tomás O’Leary’s injured ankle, but the initial prognosis was not good and it clearly cast a pall over all the squad as they reflected on their bonus-point win over the Scarlets.

“We’re still waiting,” said coach Tony McGahan, “it’s an ankle injury, but we don’t know the full story at this stage. It’s always a dampener when you have a very good player carried off and Tomás is important to us, but we’ll just have to wait and see whether he’s out next week or not.”

Sorrow for their wounded scrumhalf was also compounded by a prevailing frustration with regard to their performance.

“It was a result,” said McGahan. “Five points were there to be taken at the end and we did that, but I thought at times we lacked detail in what we were trying to do out there, and at times we were very wasteful in possession, and we’ll need to be a lot tighter than that next week.”

Jerry Flannery’s first thoughts were with O’Leary. “I’m very disappointed for Tomás, and I’ve just a kind of feeling we’ve an awful lot to build on with that performance. We came out of it with a bonus point, but that performance will be nowhere near good enough to beat Leinster next week.”

Flannery, like the rest of his team-mates, was still not sure about the extent of O’Leary’s injury, but admitted “the diagnosis doesn’t look too good. I don’t know what way to put it. I can only imagine how disappointed I would be, but Tomás is all about hard work and if he does miss this I know he’ll come back a stronger player.

“He could miss an awful lot, but that’s what we’re trying to build at Munster and we’ll keep going so that it will be there for him in another four years. But as a friend we’re all disappointed for him.”

As to why the performance was not of the standard required for next week, Flannery said: “I don’t think there was any kind of consistency to the way we played. We got a couple of good one-off tries, but we never really got into our patterns or got any kind of forward domination. I think there was a lot of loose play and our breakdown work wasn’t very good, so it’s very disappointing, because it’s generally been something that has been going very well for us.”

Alan Quinlan reflected on a fantastic week “for a number of us” and his “total shock”, but reflected the prevailing view it was in the past already. “That’s gone now. I’ve a job to do for Munster and one of our goals is to win the Magners League. The performance was very patchy . . . Unfortunately a very sad thing has happened to Tomás and our hearts go out to him and his family. We’re fortunate to have someone like Peter (Stringer), and he’ll do a great job for us.”