Facing up their ninth away semi-final out of 11, and their seventh away to a French team, Paul O'Connell was adopting his classically downbeat mode at the daunting prospect of facing Toulon in Marseille this Sunday. But then he did the same before Munster put Toulouse to the sword in the quarter-finals.
That, admittedly, was in their Thomond Park citadel, and Toulouse "weren't the most confident side in the world" at the prospect of coming to Limerick. Toulon are at a different level again, a team of superstars who have clearly gelled into a cohesive, hard-working and motivated group – a signal, according to O'Connell, being the way they celebrate tries.
'Incredible talent'
"Mentally they're probably a team that will challenge you more than any other team, similar I suppose to Clermont in many ways. They can push you around the place with sheer power but they've incredible talent then, incredible steppers, incredible footballers and they've obviously got massive gas all over the pitch as well. Not just in the backline but in the pack as well. You know you're going to be challenged every single way possible.
“It’s kind of like the feeling you get the week before you play New Zealand,” said O’Connell, the Munster captain in the absence of Peter O’Mahony, with a wry smile. “You know if you’re not, as Rob (Penney) says, if guys aren’t prepared to go beyond where they’ve been all season, you know you could almost end up getting embarrassed.”
Having watched Toulon beat Leinster, O’Connell observed: “I don’t think Leinster played as well as they have done at this stage of the tournament in the past. Leinster normally reserve their very best rugby for this stage of the tournament and they’ll be very disappointed with their quarter-final performance.
“But I know we have incredible talent as well and we don’t always play to it unfortunately. There were certainly hints of it in the Toulouse game and we’re going to need to be there and a whole lot better again to be able to even compete with these guys.”
Leinster, he said, were also uncharacteristically inaccurate. “You just don’t see a Leinster team putting the ball down as much as they did in that game. And one of the things in that game is that Leinster hung in the first half under a lot of pressure, and then when you get your chances you have to take them.
“It was the same as us last year, we hung on well against Clermont and the very small chances we got we took them and we made a game of it. That’s what we’re going to have to do this weekend.
“We’re going to have to hang in there, we’re going to need to manage that and then when we get opportunities ourselves we’re going to need to be really accurate, retain the ball and take our chances, however few they are.”
In his book Unguarded , Ronan O'Gara revealed how O'Connell seemed almost to revel in the way he was portrayed as a pantomime villain by some of the French media and the Clermont crowd in the build-up to last year's semi-final after he had accidentally kicked a prostrate Dave Kearney in the head in a preceding Munster-Leinster game.
Scale of challenge
"I wouldn't say I enjoyed it. I had an injury going into the game and I didn't know if I was going to make it through the warm-up. Once that happened I knew that if I didn't play I was chickening out," he said with another wry smile. "So I suppose it helped me get over it and get into it but once the game started it pretty much died down."
Yet in a weird, almost masochistic way, O’Connell also welcomed the scale of the challenge facing Munster this week. “I think for this team – at the moment anyway – being away from home and having the odds against us probably suits us. I just don’t think we’re at that stage yet, we’ve a lot of learning to do. As I said before the Toulouse game, we haven’t played fantastically well all season.”
