FROM THE BLINDSIDE: If there was ever any logic in the decision to remove the Ulster coach from his job at the end of the season, there doesn't look to be an awful lot in it now following the heroics at Thomond Park

I’VE RARELY come across a mood as sombre in Thomond Park as the one that was around the place after Ulster’s win there on Sunday. You can expect to win a game without being complacent about it and that was the way a lot of people in Munster were beforehand. They knew Ulster were coming with a strong team in good form but there was still a lot of excitement in the air about Munster’s chances of going on a run to win another Heineken Cup. When that disappeared, it left everybody completely empty.

But even as hard as it was to take, I couldn’t help but be delighted for Ulster and especially for Brian McLaughlin. This is a man who found out halfway through the season that he was being got rid of and yet you haven’t heard a word of complaint from him at any stage.

You haven’t come across him slating the Ulster Branch for the way he’s been treated. Not once. That shows he has a touch of class about him, which is more than you can say for the way he’s being pushed aside. It will be fairly embarrassing for the decision-makers up there if he finishes the season winning the Heineken Cup, which isn’t beyond the realms of possibility now.

If there was ever any logic in the decision to remove him from the job, there doesn’t look to be an awful lot in it now. There was all this talk about improving the Ulster brand and getting somebody world-class in to take Ulster to the next level. They just beat Munster in a Thomond Park knockout game for the first time in the history of the Heineken Cup and they’re odds-on favourites to reach the final.

Is that not the next level? Is that not a world-class achievement?

There’s a wider problem here and it’s to do with the way we in Irish rugby see ourselves. I should say first of all that none of this is having a go at Mark Anscombe, who takes over as head coach at Ulster in June. This isn’t about him. It’s about us and how we can sometimes be blinded by the idea that things are automatically done better outside Irish rugby than within it.

When I heard McLaughlin was being moved aside from the head coach’s job, I was disappointed for him but I thought that if it meant that they were going to bring in a proven world-class coach then maybe it was fair enough. I totally understand the need to avoid standing still and the fear that maybe the other teams can overtake you if you’re not constantly searching for better ways of doing things and new ways to improve. If Ulster were bringing in a Jake White or a John Kirwan, then okay. It would still have been harsh but you could see the justification behind it.

But Anscombe’s experience is with the All Blacks under-20s and some ITM teams in New Zealand. If the idea was to boost the Ulster brand, that’s not exactly the most impressive pedigree. I’m sure he’s a fine coach and that the province have been impressed with what they’ve seen and heard from him.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he was a success at Ulster, given the team he’s inheriting and the fact that Tommy Bowe, Roger Wilson and Jarrod Payne will all be available to Ulster again. I’m not questioning his ability at all.

What I am questioning is why we seem to think achievements at underage level and in provincial rugby in New Zealand are on a par with getting through the pool stages of the Heineken Cup. Whatever about what it says to McLaughlin, is that not a bit of an insult to Irish rugby in general? I think it sends a message to Irish coaches telling them that they better be very good because they won’t be judged by the same standards as a coach from the Southern Hemisphere.

When the first overseas coaches came here, it made sense. Once rugby went professional, it was only logical that Australian coaches who had lived in a country where rugby league was already on a sound professional footing would adapt to the new world better than the rest.

The same went for Kiwis because of the way the game is so all-encompassing in that country. As professional coaches, they had a ready-made advantage and somewhere like Ireland was a perfect place for them to come. They weren’t all geniuses but for the most part they were better than what we had. Nobody can argue otherwise.

We’re a small rugby-playing country and if we can bring in the best ideas, the best methods, the best thinking that there is on the game, then we should do so. That goes for coaching staff, playing staff, medical staff, the lot. But it has to be with a view to improving what we already have. That has to be the whole point of it.

How can we do that if Irish coaches are sent the message that foreign coaches are automatically going to be thought of as better?

Michael Bradley has had to go to Edinburgh to bring his coaching reputation to the next level. He banged his head against a brick wall for years with Connacht but that was never going to be enough to get him one of the big provincial jobs here. Now that he’s in a Heineken Cup semi-final, people will stand up and far more take notice of him. They will talk of him as a possible future coach of one of the big provinces here and – let’s be honest about it – part of that is because his achievement has happened outside of Ireland.

Take Bradley at Edinburgh, Mark McCall at Saracens, Conor O’Shea at Harlequins. It seems to me that some of our coaches are more trusted abroad than they are at home.

We should take more pride in ourselves. There’s a reason international coaches want to come here and work with these provinces – it’s because they’re big jobs on a massive stage. That hasn’t happened by accident.

The Ulster job is far more attractive now than it was when McLaughlin took over. They hadn’t made it out of a Heineken Cup pool in nearly a decade. But he’s built something that everyone in Ulster can be proud of and he’s taken it to the point where there is enormous pressure on whoever is head coach there now.

He’s dealt with that pressure very well and kept on achieving, yet he’s being pushed aside to make way for the head coach of the New Zealand under-20s. I think that’s a sad admission to make – that for some reason we see that as carrying more weight than the achievements of one of our own.

Again, I have no problem at all with foreign coaches coming in. If it turns out that Tony McGahan’s replacement in Munster is from overseas, then so be it. As long as he’s the right man for the job. Obviously, I’d love to see Anthony Foley being given an opportunity there but if it doesn’t go his way, I can understand the reasoning. The people who’ve put themselves out there for the Munster job are the likes of Kirwan, Pat Lam and Nick Mallett. These are guys with huge experience and huge credibility in the game and if an Irish coach gets passed over in favour of someone of that calibre, I wouldn’t see it as any great slight. But I don’t think anyone can say that Mark Anscombe will be coming here with those sort of credentials.

McLaughlin’s credentials look much better after last weekend. One thing he has done is up the ante for the incoming Munster coach In giving up a 19-point lead from early on, Munster set themselves a problem they didn’t have the solution to. There just wasn’t enough pace and creativity in the Munster team to close the gap and that lack of a cutting edge is going to be one of the first things a new coach must address.

The mood was very sombre in Limerick afterwards. There’s a lot of pain there because the pool stage had convinced everyone there was a real possibility that they could do it again this year. But what we saw on Sunday was that there are a lot of young players at Munster now who need a bit of time and a bit more experience. They’re not as far on with their development as we maybe thought they were and they were found out a little bit.

Ulster’s game plan was to get in Munster’s face from the start and it worked out perfectly. They won everything at the breakdown early on and then built up a lead on the back of it, kicking their penalties while Craig Gilroy scored a great individual try. When you give yourself the cushion of a lead, you know that it’s just a matter of soaking up pressure for the rest of the game. You can get yourself into the right frame of mind quite easily – you promise yourself and each other that you’re going to make every tackle and you get a siege mentality going.

Every mistake the opposition make against you means more to you than in a normal situation because you know it’s making them more anxious. Your desire grows, your will-to-win grows and the longer the game goes on, the more you believe that it’s going to happen. I doubt if Ulster thought they’d manage to establish a 19-point lead but once they had it, they used it to perfection. Munster lacked the quality needed to create tries and the penetration just wasn’t there.

In the end, Ulster fully deserved their win. And their coach deserves better .