Just like Christmas morning, everything was all right in the end. Munster fiddled and fumbled and in the last quarter of an hour rustled up three tries that covered the bags under their eyes and the care lines on their face. The 28-point winning margin was only a white lie.
Twenty-two years after the so-called Miracle Match between these teams, there was no trace of celestial intervention. The rugby was full of anxiety and errors. A perishing wind was soon followed by sheets of rain, both of which helped to dull the spectacle.
But there was no reasonable excuse for some of the handling. Jean Kleyn, Munster’s Springbok secondrow, dropped two or three simple passes, as if he was trying to catch the ball with oven gloves.
To build a performance Munster needed to execute the elementary stuff that had deserted them so catastrophically in Bath a week ago, but they didn’t hit that basic threshold. The lineout was better but the scrum suffered again and in the third quarter alone Munster’s pack were penalised three times.
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Their finishing was clumsy too. Four times in the game they either coughed up the ball or committed an infringement less than five metres from the Gloucester line. A terrific crowd of 36,208 inside Páirc Úi Chaoimh were desperate to make an emotional investment in the game, but every mistake anaesthetised the atmosphere.
Playing against the wind in the opening half, especially, Munster spent long spells defending against what was essentially Gloucester’s second string. The visitors made 15 changes from their victory over Castres last weekend and travelled to Cork with a bunch of youngsters. For an hour their pluckiness frustrated Munster.
Eventually the breakthroughs came. The outstanding Alex Nankivell played the scoring pass for two of Munster’s second-half tries and both of them were sublimely executed. For the first he released Mike Haley with a pass from the back of his hand, and the other he put Tom Farrell away under the posts with a whiplash pass that only travelled the length of his arm but disabled the last line of the Gloucester defence.
It is hard to know how much confidence Munster can take from this performance. Gloucester had a player in the sinbin when the home team scored their last two tries, but when the visitors were reduced to 14 men just before the break, they failed make a dent on the scoreboard.
But there were bright spots. Young Ben O’Connor was impressive on his first Champions Cup start on the wing. His handling in the air was clean and sound and he was courageous on the ground. He also played a critical part in the try that finally gave Munster some impetus early in the second half.
Chasing what looked like a lost cause he made a terrific tackle on the Gloucester fullback George Barton and forced a turnover. Munster attacked from the resultant scrum and O’Connor was involved again, punching a big hole in Gloucester’s midfield. The last time O’Connor played in this stadium was for the Cork under-20 hurlers two years ago and his progress with Munster has been slower than he would have hoped, but this performance will nourish his confidence.
For Munster the economics of bringing a high-profile competitive match to Páirc Úi Chaoimh have been debated almost since the stadium was reopened eight years ago. Limerick has held on jealously to the Leinster fixture at Christmas, which is now the only time in the season when Thomond Park is likely to be full, or close to it. But after this departure from Munster’s established schedule, calls for a rotation of the Christmas fixture between Cork and Limerick are bound to intensify.
They didn’t fill Páirc Uí Chaoimh on Saturday night, but the attendance was nearly 20,000 more than Munster’s home game against Stade Francais in Thomond Park a year ago. If for no other reason, it made commercial sense.
The crowd was a coalition of the committed and the curious. The Champions Cup has far too many decaffeinated games in the pool stages now, with teams sending shadow squads to away fixtures and keeping more than one eye on their domestic programme.
This game would have been a hard sell in Thomond Park. Here, they got away with it.
