It ebbed, even if it didn't always flow, and ultimately it panned out pretty much as expected. To put Saturday's Guinness Inteprovincial at Temple Hill at its most glib, the men beat the boys.
Young, talented and pacey, Leinster always looked to have the measure of Munster out wide, skinning them there a couple of times. They took the lead twice, and threatened to do so a third time before Munster raised the tempo and turned the screw. For all Leinster's bravura amongst the outside backs, Munster's generally greater solidity, savvy and sharpness from numbers one to 12 won the day - as you always felt it would.
With Munster having extracted a maximum haul of five points, Leinster came in search of one bonus point at the end for getting to within seven of their hosts. The Munster scrum creaked, and Leinster declined a penalty to go for another shove. In came Marcus Horan to replace John Hayes, Peter Clohessy switching to tighthead and immediately shunting Reggie Corrigan skywards and backwards. Just to rub their noses in it.
An added boon for Munster was that their line-out functioned far better. Munster were also less inclined to make turnovers (and predictably there were many in a fastidiously refereed seasonal opener) and thus apply more continuity.
Stoked up from the off, they hammered away around the fringes through Keith Wood (whose toe-to-toe, mano-a-mano lengthy exchange of punches with Shane Byrne hilariously went unseen by all three officials but no-one in the 3,000-4,000 crowd) and the rest of the forward target runners, or through Mike Mullins, and generally had the greater impact on the gain line.
Tom Tierney, and to an extent Brian O'Meara, along with the assured Ronan O'Gara gave Munster better direction and they lorded the game territorially.
Leinster fronted up well in the scrums and around the fringes but more disconcerting for them was the frequency with which a more alert Munster won breaking loose ball, particularly off restarts.
This put Leinster on the back foot and prevented them from protecting a 13-10 lead early in the second half after the first of Denis Hickie's two smartly taken tries, and subsequently enabled Munster to inflict a crucial double whammy nearing the hour.
After Anthony Foley cleverly gathered Brian O'Meara's inside pass to swivel, duck and reach out for the line, John O'Neill successfully challenged Girvan Dempsey to O'Meara's box-kick off the restart. Nobody filled in for Dempsey, and Leinster collectively froze as John Kelly snaffled up the breaking ball, turned through non-existent tackles and headed off from inside halfway. It was an opportunist, well-taken score, or a soft one, depending on your viewpoint.
Brian O'Driscoll was the class act on view. One brilliant off-load gave the sharp Girvan Dempsey and Hickie a break-out, but Hickie fumbled the reverse pass. One jinking break took him clear of everybody but Dominic Crotty, only for him to make his last sidestep a fraction too soon. Another mesmeric bout of sidestepping created the ruck ball and space for Barry Everitt and Dempsey to put Hickie away for his first try, and it was O'Driscoll's quick transfer off David Corkery's ill-conceived chip ahead which put Hickie away for his long-range second. But by then Munster's fringe pressure was making the cracks. David Wallace, crucially, O'Gara, Mullins and Alan Quinlan had all made inroads through six or seven phases before Mick Lynch gathered O'Meara's loose pass to intuitively chip through for their decisive fourth try by John O'Neill. A raw, strong if limited player, O'Neill had earlier wasted similar sustained pressure when ignoring the unmarked Wallace outside him after Wood, burrowing away and legs pumping, had required a posse of blues to bring him down.
Munster are a team that have to work hard for their tries, either through capitalising on opposition mistakes or battering away until the cracks surface, and so to score four of them was a bonus in every sense.
Declan Kidney likened it "to two planes coming in to land. If you were able to sail in you were grand, but if you tipped over . . ." As it happened, Munster hit the ground running.
Kidney admitted that the unrewarded possession and territory was a concern, but said: "We were attacking them on the fringes and we weren't making a whole lot of headway so we started putting it in behind them, and that paved the way. The players responded very well."
As Kidney observed, Leinster will assuredly get better. Bob Casey dug deep but was understandably jaded-looking after his double tour summer only came to an end last Monday (and thus, surprisingly, lasted 80 minutes as Brian Cusack kicked his heels on the bench) while Malcolm O'Kelly was only playing his second full game since his shoulder operation. Trevor Brennan emerged creditably from his frisky duel with Corkery, though is still not 100 per cent, and new combinations will assuredly improve as the season unwinds.
Lamenting the "naivety" which prevented Leinster from maintaining territorial pressure at 2024 down, Mike Ruddock countered this by saying: "But there were so many positive things I'm certainly not down in the dumps." Sniffling through a bloodied and broken nose, Hickie said: "I thought when we played we showed we can score tries. We created a lot of chances but, unfortunately, the reason we didn't win was that we missed tackles, and they punished us very well when we did."
Scoring sequence: 8 mins: Everitt pen, 0-3; 9 mins: Langford try, O'Gara con, 7-3; 19 mins: O'Gara pen, 10-3; 40 mins: Everitt pen, 10-6 (half-tie 10-6); 43 mins: Hickie try, Everitt con, 10-13; 56 mins: Foley try, O'Gara con, 17-13; 58 mins: Kelly try, O'Gara con, 24-13; 63 mins: Hickie try, Everitt con, 24-20; 73 mins: O'Neill try, O'Gara con, 31-20.
MUNSTER: D Crotty; J O'Neill, J Kelly, M Mullins, A Horgan; R O'Gara, T Tierney; P Clohessy, K Wood, J Hayes, M Galwey (capt), J Langford, D Corkery, A Foley, D Wallace. Replacements: M Lynch for Horgaan (18 mins), B O'Meara for Tierney (half-time), F Sheehan for Wood (50 mins), A Quinlan for Corkery (64 mins), M Horan for Hayes (80 mins).
LEINSTER: G Dempsey; D Hickie (capt), B O'Driscoll, G Gannon, J McWeeney; B Everitt, C Scally; R Corrigan, S Byrne, A McKeen, R Casey, M O'Kelly, T Brennan, V Costello, L Toland. Replacements: P Smyth for Byrne (60 mins), D O'Brien for Brennan (60 mins), D Hegarty for Scally (76 mins), (temp) P McKenna for Hickie (70-74 mins).
Referee: A Watson (Ulster).
