GRAHAM ROWNTREE REELS off a list of Irish coastal hotspots to which he gave visit during his summer break.
Among the highlights was a week spent near Enniscrone Beach in Sligo, he says.
He’s done Kinsale, Skibbereen and Baltimore but still feels he has only scratched the surface of West Cork, from where several of his Munster players hail.
His family especially adored Kerry; Waterville and Dingle receive special mentions.
“And then I’ve got a mate who’s got a place in Ballydavid”, says Rowntree, “which is just on the coast, north of Dingle.
“He owns Tigh T.P., the big bar along the waterfront.
“Now, it was full of stag dos when I was there — a load of Dubs in there, winding me up,” Rowntree smirks.
“And I’d say to them, ‘Let me just get my phone out, there . . .”
He brandishes the phone in real-time, screen facing forward. His lock-screen is a graphic of his players celebrating their 2022/23 URC title, crowned by the emboldened words: ‘CHAMPIONS: MUNSTER.’
All in all, it sounds like a summer well spent.
Rowntree at Munster training. Dan Sheridan / INPHO
Dan Sheridan / INPHO / INPHO
More recently, Rowntree continued west with his defence coach Denis Leamy and his fullback Mike Haley — to New York, which hosted this year’s 300-person-strong ‘Friends of Munster Rugby Fundraising Dinner’.
Rowntree and his wife, Nicky, stayed an extra couple of nights in the Big Apple. They watched Ireland’s World Cup pool game with Scotland in The Joyce bar at the corner of Hell’s Kitchen and The Garment District. “Bedlam,” he smiles.
They also took in a Broadway showing of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s culturally phenomenal musical about an outsider who came to a new country, assumed the role of right-hand man to the commander-in-chief, and became instrumental in a revolution…
Ah, maybe it’s tenuous.
“Well, I didn’t have a clue what was going on anyway, to be honest with you,” Rowntree laughs. “But I love rap music and the tunes, the whole thing, was absolutely incredible.”
For a fair stretch of his four years at Munster to date, Rowntree did still feel like an outsider or something close to it. Certainly, he was acutely aware of his Englishness while living in Limerick.
He was, after all, synonymous with a similarly proud rugby institution across the Irish Sea, Leicester Tigers, for whom he lined out for the entirety of his playing career.
And though he arrived at Munster in 2019 as a hugely respected coach, he had no tangible connection to his new place of work. In fact, bizarrely, considering their healthy rivalry with Leicester in the early to mid-2000s, Rowntree scarcely crossed paths with Munster at all during his 17 years as a player.
“I never even played at Thomond, funnily,” he says.
“Although there was one well-documented game between Munster and Leicester at the Millennium Stadium. . .” Rowntree begins to laugh, recalling the infamous ‘Hand of Back’ incident during Leicester’s 2002 Heineken Cup final victory over Munster.
“Crikey . . . And in my flipping first interview here, the first question was about that! It was tongue-in-cheek but I actually had to remind them that I was off the field at that time.”
Rowntree shipping some 'borderline' contact from Paul O'Connell during the 2002 Heineken Cup final. INPHO
INPHO
More recently, though, Rowntree has found himself beginning to feel increasingly like a Munsterman.
It was bound to be the case when he took the reins from the man who brought him to the province, Johann van Graan, and assumed a more prominent role within the Munster Rugby universe.
The transition to full-blown One of their Own will likely only accelerate now that his future lies in Limerick until at least 2026.
“And it’s not even just at work,” Rowntree explains. “We even have Irish sayings at home now. ‘Grand’ is the big one, obviously, but there are more subtle examples. My wife and I joke about it — we find ourselves saying things like, ‘We’ll go out for dinner, will we?’ It’s just these little quirks that you might not even notice if you are actually Irish.”
Two of the Rowntrees’ three kids are still in Ireland: their eldest, Lily, did a stint at the Limerick Leader newspaper as a media-sales specialist and now works for an events company.
The baby, Joel, is actually a six-foot-three centre who played Junior Cup with Castletroy College earlier this year. He wore an Ireland jersey during the World Cup. “His ears are fine as well,” Rowntree says, offering a thumb towards his own war wounds.
Middle sibling Jack, meanwhile, is back in England finishing a Sports Science degree at Loughborough University.
“No, we feel very much at home here, now,” Rowntree says. “You can never be sure what the future holds in my line of work, obviously, but we are happy here.
“As we see when we get to explore Ireland, it’s a stunning country. Good people. You don’t know how lucky you are, honestly.”
Really, though, it’s Munster who have landed on their feet.
Just over 18 months ago, they were still exploring the market to fill Johann van Graan’s seat, a vacancy for which Rowntree was unabashed in expressing his interest.
It was an extremely protracted process during which Rowntree’s future at the province was unclear and his family’s future in Ireland uncertain.
Credit to Munster, who ultimately promoted from within the coach who would steer them to their first trophy since the 2010/11 Celtic League; and equal credit to them for securing the resources to complement him with his preferred coaching ticket. It transpired to be some of the province’s most astute business in years.
But from the perspective of an in-demand coach like Rowntree, why did it make sense to hang tough for the gig in the first place? And what gave him the belief that he could step up from within to revitalise a club of Munster’s stature in his first head-coaching role?
The boss arrives to work at Thomond. Ben Brady / INPHO
Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO
“They’re fair questions considering I’d seen first-hand the magnitude of the job and the pressure of it,” he says.
I saw the stick that Johann had gotten. I was there. I saw what it did to him. I say ‘what it did to him’ — I just mean how consuming it was every day for him.
“Everyone’s looking at you. The club has an expectancy — internally, externally — to do well. And I’d already seen what that looks like, what that means to people.
“I always had aspirations to be a head coach. Always. But it’s gotta be right, y’know? That’d be the advice I’d give to any young coach: you’ve got to understand where you are in your career. You have to be right to take on a role like this. I felt I was right.
“I had a really strong feeling for the club, so I threw my hat in the ring. And it was quite a lengthy process.
“You might say I fit in well here because it’s a ‘blue-collar’ community. I would respectfully call it ‘working class’ — although maybe it’s just a different way of saying the same thing.
“I grew up with that in Leicester: people will just tell you, straight out, how they feel you’re going, whether it’s how you’re playing or how the club is going. But they’ll congratulate you as well. I get that here, good or bad, down the shops or wherever I might be.
“I mean, the emotion that I’ve received after we’ve won a trophy, particularly from the older generation of Munster fans, is quite . . . Well, it’s actually emotional, y’know? That’s the word.”
Rowntree with former Munster boss Johann van Graan, who hired him at the province in 2019. Dan Sheridan / INPHO
Dan Sheridan / INPHO / INPHO
It was a long wait for those Munster elders, all of whom lived and breathed the European triumphs of 2006 and 2008 as well as the league titles in ’03, ’09 and ’11.
Equally important was that Munster’s remarkable URC victory in Cape Town in May ended what had become an interminable wait to raise silverware for legends of the province including Peter O’Mahony and Conor Murray, over whose heads the 2000s had hung as a kind of unreachable criterion for success.
More profoundly, though, there are kids across the province in Joel Rowntree’s age bracket who had no memory of Munster winning anything at all.
Last season’s remarkable road run through the URC play-offs gave the younger generation of Munster fan their first ‘miracle’, a real-life reference point outside of low-def YouTube footage.
They know now that actually, it doesn’t always have to be Leinster, and that actually, their club’s ‘Brave and Faithful’ motto is more than mere lip service.
New legacies have grown from less.
“I hope you’re right,” Rowntree smiles. “That’s certainly my intention.
“You can feel the province is ready for it, to really build that base.
Home-grown talent is a huge focus of ours now; the pathways all the way down to young kids in Bantry, and getting resources to them. Because we haven’t got the resources of the Blackrocks and St Michael’s and St Mary’s, we’ve got to get out to these kids and support the schools and clubs how we can.
“Ian Costello (head of rugby operations) put together an incredible summer programme, pulling people from all over the province so that some of these kids could get coaching three or four days a week.
“We have to get that right. There’s a massive emphasis from the club to push talent through. And I will. I, as head coach, will push through young, homegrown players. If you’re good enough, you’re old enough. I think we’ve proven that already with the likes of Alex Kendellen and Ruadhán Quinn.
“We want to make the Munster Rugby community proud of its own homegrown talent.
“It’s not for me to say we’re ‘rebuilding’ a connection, because I’m not going to cast aspersions on previous regimes and say it wasn’t there before. We’ve just changed it to what we want to do.
For example, we’ve got all the AIL coaches in here tomorrow just to see what they’re doing, to talk to them, to tell them what we’re trying to do. And I want our young lads to play AIL, as a good portion of them have been doing already in the first couple of rounds. Crikey, we trained against Cork Con on 22 August: good hit-out. And then we trained against Shannon a week later. I want the clubs to understand that we want to help them.
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“The schools as well. We’ve already had a lot of the schools coaches in. We want it to be open here.”
Thomas Ahern prepares to hit the tackle bag during Munster's joint training session with Shannon in August. Ben Brady / INPHO
Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO
When it comes to underage-talent recruitment, Munster’s home base of Limerick is a particularly competitive catchment area.
Chasing an unprecedented five-in-a-row, the county’s senior hurlers have become a cultural phenomenon. Hurling is well resourced on Shannonside and Limerick’s own pathways are the envy of other sports, not to mind every other hurling county in the land.
This tectonic shift in the Treaty County felt most pronounced three years ago, when St Munchin’s College graduate Paddy Kelly was the only player from Limerick in Munster’s academy. Dave Kilcoyne, meanwhile, was the only senior forward from Limerick at a club which had partly built its modern image on the shoulders of Treaty County titans like Peter Clohessy, ‘Axel’ Foley, David Wallace, Paul O’Connell and Jerry Flannery.
It became a point of mild embarrassment and, consequently, one of serious focus for Munster, who have since clawed back plenty of ground: their current academy stock has a distinctly greenish hue to it.
The Limerick senior hurlers have a new admirer in Munster’s head coach, too, albeit he’s wary of nailing his own colours to their mast given his job spec.
“John Kiely is a very good man,” Rowntree says of his local hurling counterpart. “I’ve met him a couple of times.
“He got me tickets to the Munster final, my first hurling game — 11 June, I think it was. Limerick and Clare. My God. What a game.
“I am just blown away by it as a sport. Just going there live, to the Gaelic Grounds: there’s no music, there’s one bloke in charge — no TMO. And you’ve got to attack.
“You’ve got to find space. Your mate’s 20 metres away from you, you’ve got to find him. Fast.
And that Munster final… I dunno if you remember it, but we beat Cla– ‘We?’” Rowntree stops himself. “I’m not sure if I should say that, actually!” he laughs. “They wanted me to wear a Limerick shirt to the match. I was like, ‘I’m the Munster coach, I can’t be siding against Clare!’
“But I love the purity of hurling and I’ve been invited to go and watch Limerick train, spend some time with John, which I intend to. I’ve just not had time yet but I’m a great admirer of what he’s built there.”
Limerick senior hurling boss John Kiely has a fan in his Munster Rugby counterpart. Morgan Treacy / INPHO
Morgan Treacy / INPHO / INPHO
For the first two months of his own reign, Rowntree’s rebuild of Munster bore the hallmarks of a slow burner.
“In hindsight, maybe we changed too much, too quickly.”
Rowntree chuckles to himself: “I remember doing media, I think it was internally, and I was like, ‘Ah, I’m not reinventing the wheel. We’re just going to change a few things.’
“. . . F–n’ hell, we changed everything.
“Obviously, there was a new coaching team, which I’d done my research on. I hadn’t just brought Denis [Leamy] and Mike [Prendergast] on board because they were Munster men; I’d brought them in because I thought they were great coaches and great people.
“And I could feel it from Day 1 with them: ‘Yep.’ It was just different, and the lads could feel it too.
“It’s all about the engagement with the players. That’s all you need. And that was especially important because the way we were going to play the game was quite different to what we’d done before. But it was everything I wanted to do: I wanted to challenge teams by moving the ball. I wanted us to become a possession team — a real possession team.
“If we were going to do that, we had to up our skills. We had to up our fitness. We had to think quicker. And we only had a few weeks.”
Rattling through Munster’s five defeats from their opening seven games last season, Rowntree makes a point of noting that the margins were slender in most of them.
He would frame those losses to his players as games in which they had run out of time while enduring teething problems in his new system.
The trouble was, though, that Munster were more than a third of the way through their league campaign and their chances of qualifying for this season’s Champions Cup were becoming increasingly vulnerable to the hourglass as well.
Denis Leamy, Mike Prendergast, Graham Rowntree and Andi Kyriacou stroll through UL. Morgan Treacy / INPHO
Morgan Treacy / INPHO / INPHO
The South Africa game at Páirc Uí Chaoimh was famously catalytic. Mike Prendergast’s multi-layered attack clicked into gear. For months, Munster didn’t look back.
They had a couple of good cracks off Toulouse in Europe and Leinster in the URC. They began to put away the teams that they were supposed to beat and even took home the four points from Ulster on New Year’s Day in what was the standout result of Rowntree’s tenure to that point.
Munster won four on the bounce from that night in Ravenhill and headed into the stop-start Six Nations window with qualification for both the URC play-offs and the Champions Cup plainly in their sights.
Then came the blip.
In their three games between 3 March and 1 April, Munster conceded 130 points: they survived a Scarlets fightback in Cork and sneaked out as 49-42 winners; they went 28-0 down to Glasgow Warriors at Thomond, eventually losing 38-26; and they got blown out of the Champions Cup by the Sharks, a flurry of late replies putting a bit of respect on a 50-35 scoreline to the South Africans.
“Blip!?” Rowntree asks, incredulous. “It was a punch in the nose.
“I will say the Scarlets game was an anomaly,” he continues. “That was a strange game, that. A bad week. We’d buried Tom Tierney the day before. A lot of young men who worked with Tom and loved Tom were at that funeral, and then the next day they’re playing a game of rugby. I’m thinking of the likes of Pa Campbell, Ethan Coughlan.
“I can’t remember the score at half-time, I think we were leading 35-something (35-7). We were flying, playing unbelievable rugby. A few things caught up with us. Scarlets grew and grew. And a few of our young men learned some valuable lessons that night.
“And at the end of that game, unashamedly, I’ll admit that when we got that penalty on halfway, it was me who said, ‘Posts.’ And the players weren’t happy afterwards. See, our whole mantra was that we were going to play: ‘You need more than points — you need tries.’ I’d been telling them we’re always going to keep the ball on the field. We’re always going to back our fitness.
So, in the dressing room afterwards, the players are like, ‘Why are we doing that?! Why are we being told to go for the posts?!’ And the answer was because I wanted to get out of there. I’d fucking had enough. It had become such an emotionally unstable game.
Munster applaud Scarlets off the field at Musgrave Park. Ben Brady / INPHO
Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO
It was over three weeks before Munster faced Glasgow in their next URC fixture, which was just their third game across the seven-week international block.
Rowntree warns that such momentum-killing gaps in Munster’s calendar “won’t happen again”: he has already pencilled in a couple of friendlies for next year’s Six Nations.
All of that being said, he recalls his side’s preparation for the visit of Glasgow feeling “absolutely perfect”. Nobody was more astonished than Munster themselves when the Warriors hit them for a bonus point before half-time.
“We had to calm things down, recalibrate. And we scored four tries in the second half but we ran out of time. That was a punch in the nose.
“And I just remember standing in the dressing room with the coaches afterwards, planning a squad to get on a plane to go to South Africa the following Monday to play the Sharks in Durban in the Champions Cup. ‘Right, who are we taking? What are we doing?’”
In the end, the Sharks blitzed Munster in the third quarter, racked up 50, and sent them out of Europe in a state approaching existential crisis.
“We came back from South Africa and we stripped our game down,” Rowntree says. “We had a good look at ourselves. We had a good three-hour meeting upstairs (at the High Performance Centre in UL). Everybody. Just hammering things out. We had a few breaks, but we just went through our game, talking about things.
“And Denis [Leamy] in particular stripped our defence back and found a few glitches.
I don’t mind telling you this because I think Denis would tell you himself: we’d made a thing about how we’re training quicker, right? But everything had become quicker. And we were just overlooking a few things, defensively. We were almost too quick into certain positions to do those positions properly.
“It was as simple as that, so we worked on correcting it.”
Prendergast, Rowntree and Leamy. Ben Brady / INPHO
Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO
Munster had two games left to salvage Champions Cup qualification and squeeze into the URC post-season.
It just so happened that they were two of the most perilous away fixtures in club rugby: back to South Africa to face the Stormers, who had never lost a home URC game and were unbeaten against northern-hemisphere opposition in Cape Town; and then over to Durban for a re-run with the Sharks, who were scrapping for the same spoils as their visitors.
Rowntree’s men needed points and the likelihood was that they had a better chance of returning from Africa with a boot up their arse than with anything especially helpful to their cause.
This was serious.
“Not that the board or anyone had ever put pressure on me to this effect, but there’s a few million reasons why you want to be in Europe,” Rowntree laughs.
“The Stormers had been on the road, they’d lost to Exeter, and they had a long trip home but they were talking themselves up, saying they were going to try and beat us up early on with maul tries. And we did it to them instead.
“Our fitness came through. And we went to Durban a week after and we’re 22-3 down to the Sharks on 58 minutes, but we came back and scored three tries.”
A brilliant win and a rousing, comeback draw. Fifth place was secured, and with it both a URC quarter-final trip to Glasgow and a Champions Cup berth for the following season.
Munster were starting to punch back.
Alex Kendellen takes on the Sharks' Lukhanyo Am during the league game in Durban. Steve Haag Sports / Steve Haag/INPHO
Steve Haag Sports / Steve Haag/INPHO / Steve Haag/INPHO
“We kept driving this thing in the group about being on the road, being battle-hardened,” Rowntree says.
“The thing is, when you’ve been to South Africa and put in two performances like that, you can go anywhere for a quarter-final with credibility. Just being coach, being in team environments, I know what that’s like, then, from Glasgow’s perspective: ‘These lads have been to South Africa and done that. They scored seven tries.’ It does have an effect.”
Another road victory followed at Scotstoun. It was aided by a Warriors red card, sure, but it was underpinned by early sets of goal-line defence the likes of which Rowntree had never seen from his team before.
“And then you’ve got a semi-final against our old mates up the road,” Rowntree smiles.
“I didn’t realise the extent of the Munster-Leinster rivalry until I got here, to be honest with you,” he says. “You don’t get it until you taste it.
I first came over here in May 2019 to speak to Johann about becoming forwards coach. I rang Stuart [Lancaster] up, just about the logistics of it all. And the first thing he said was, ‘You realise, now, we can never speak to each other again?’ And I go, ‘What d’you mean?!’ And he just went, ‘You’ll see.’
Dan Sheridan / INPHO
Dan Sheridan / INPHO / INPHO
Gavin Coombes lifts Craig Casey at the final whistle.
Munster’s late show during the semi-final at Lansdowne Road had the Rowntree coaching ticket’s fingerprints all over it: bravery, skill, fitness, and Jack Crowley.
Even more gratifying for the head coach than his young out-half’s unflappable finish was the genesis of that decisive score.
By his own admission, Rowntree is obsessed with four-minute ’bouts’, and Munster do their over-speed training in blocks of the same duration.
Carried out at warp speed, the sessions go a little something like this: Run the ball. Pass the ball. If circumstances dictate, kick the ball. If the ball is gone for any reason, keep your head. Stay in the game. Win it back. Rinse and repeat as many times as are necessary for a positive outcome after four minutes.
In their semi-final win over Leinster, Munster kicked the ball twice after Gavin Coombes’ big turnover win deep inside his own 22′ on 75 minutes and 20-odd seconds. Crowley slotted the winner 70 yards up the pitch less than two and a half minutes later.
“It’s my most watched piece of rugby from last season, to be honest with you,” says Rowntree, who can recite all of its composite moments to near perfection.
“I’ve watched the final multiple times but I’d say that end to the semi, those last four or five minutes . . . I’ve probably watched that more. I’ll never forget that.
”Is it Ryle Nugent, the commentator? ‘They were calling for the head of Graham Rowntree! They were calling for some of the players to be replaced!’ Rowntree laughs, partly at his own impression. But also partly because he kept watching it back thinking, “‘F–n’ hell . . . Really!? Did it get to that!?’”
Rowntree preparing for Munster's pre-season friendly with Connacht. Tom Maher / INPHO
Tom Maher / INPHO / INPHO
Munster marched on to complete the job back in Cape Town, upsetting the overtly confident Stormers for a second time in their backyard.
The wait was over. A weight was lifted. And so too was a first piece of silverware since 2011.
Incidentally, Rowntree almost spits the words when he recalls somebody asking him beforehand if the URC final was a “free shot”.
When he saw referee Andrea Piardi blow the final whistle from the coaches’ box at DHL Stadium, Munster’s head coach did not cut the figure of a man who believes in the concept of bonus territory.
That image of an instantly decompressed Rowntree, his head resting in his hands while all hell breaks loose around him, will forever be a piece of Munster’s iconography alongside the flailing arms of 1978, Donncha O’Callaghan’s Y-fronts, Peter Stringer sending Biarritz for chips in Cardiff, and the rest of the magical scenes that make up the province’s rich rugby tapestry.
Rowntree’s new-school Munster had pulled off an old-school knockout run that would have been frankly unthinkable only a couple of months earlier.
“Iconography? Is that a word?” he asks. “I obviously know ‘iconic’, but iconography . . . Jesus. Listen, I’ll take that.
“It was just absolute relief. The sheer weight of it. Just, ‘Tssscchhhhh’…” Rowntree bows his head. “You turn the tap on, release the emotion.
“It was just a pressure that we had put on ourselves. To get that far, to get a taste, to have this opportunity . . . the idea of wasting that opportunity was just unthinkable.
“I’m quite calm in the coaching box anyway and the best leaders I’ve worked with, or under, are quite calm; steely under pressure. What you are under pressure defines you and, in that circumstance, it’s a great characteristic to be calm.
“So, I try to be calm and I try to keep the rest of them calm: ‘Get down for f…’” Rowntree laughs, tugging the sleeve of the imaginary coach beside him.
“And when that maul collapsed at the end and the lads in the box first started jumping around, I’m thinking, ‘The referee’s not blown his whistle.’ You can actually see me pointing, going, ‘He’s not blown his whis– oh, he has!’” Rowntree slumps forward again, recreating the moment of release. “Just . . . emotional.”
Rowntree turns on the tap.
Munster’s lead performance analyst and technical coach George Murray, attack coach Mike Prendergast, head coach Graham Rowntree, defence Denis Leamy, and forwards coach Andy Kyriacou. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
Lips wobbled again the following Monday evening when Munster were serenaded by 10,000-plus supporters at a sun-kissed Thomond Park.
Former centre Barry Murphy, these days of Hermitage Green fame, answered the call to MC the squad’s homecoming.
“And the bloody lads had been on it since 11 o’clock in the morning, hadn’t they? Half of them couldn’t speak,” Rowntree says.
“And Barry’s freestyling it in a way that only Barry can. I love the man.
“But our media people had given him instructions: ‘Speak to Graham’ — because I was . . . sober, and ‘speak to Tadhg Beirne’, who was relatively sober. ‘Do not speak to anybody else.’
“So Barry’s got the microphone in front of 10,000 people and he’s going to John Hodnett, he’s going to Earlsy . . .” Rowntree laughs. “It was beautiful chaos.
“We ended up in Rashers pub in town at 11:30 that night. All of a sudden, it’s full of rugby fans who’d heard that we were there.
I remember looking at the trophy — I was going to leave in half an hour — and I remember thinking, ‘If I don’t get this trophy home, it’s going to end up in the Shannon.’ I got in a cab, brought the trophy with me. Fell asleep in the cab but made it home. I was putting the key in the door and the taxi driver taps me on the shoulder: ‘Your trophy, sir.’
“So much for safekeeping.
“The next morning, I had to go to SuperValu to buy some glue. The top had come off it. There’s a screwable, blue top but this little inner piece had come out.”
Former Munster star Barry Murphy with head coach Rowntree at the homecoming. Ben Brady / INPHO
Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO
Munster won’t fancy handing the trophy back, and not because of any light damage incurred back in May.
Their URC title defence begins with today’s visit of the Sharks to Thomond (5:15pm), for which Rowntree will be without his World Cup contingent.
His Ireland players will take several weeks off to rest tired minds and bodies and, eventually, to begin the process of reverting their focus back to the red jersey.
When they do return to Munster, however, they’ll do so a man light.
And “what a man” says Rowntree of Keith Earls, who announced his retirement from rugby following Ireland’s quarter-final exit in France.
“He battled through his injuries last season and, suddenly, in the spring, he was available to us. We had a 6-2 split against Leinster (in the URC semi-final) and we needed him to do 80 minutes, and he did. And he played exceptionally well, too. He’s tough. He’s a great man to have around.
He’ll make a great coach, Keith. But he’s a businessman, he’s got his coffee (Eleven14), so whether he’d need to coach or not, I don’t know. But he’d be an unbelievable addition to any environment. I mean, he’s been here so long, but he still gave so much last season. He still had that same enthusiasm.
Still in France, meanwhile, is Jean Kleyn, whose rise to the rank of test Springbok is conflicting for his club boss: on a personal level, Rowntree is proud as punch of his tighthead lock. On the professional front, though, Kleyn suddenly becoming non-Irish-qualified will bring with it complications in the medium-term.
“Just a tad,” Rowntree says, wide-eyed. “We’ll have to wait and see what the future holds in that regard.
“But what I can say is Jean had an exceptional season last season and we’re hugely proud of him as a club.
“He’s fulfilled a childhood dream there.”
Rowntree also reserves a word for newly turned Scottish international Ben Healy, with whom he remains in contact even since Healy moved to Edinburgh to launch a test career from his maternal grandparents’ home country.
“I didn’t want him to leave. Such a talent, Ben. Good kid as well, great energy. Very diligent. I was delighted for him to have gotten his test caps, and good luck to him. There are no hard feelings there at all. He’s still in touch.”
Keith Earls: Munsterman. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
Munster's Jean Kleyn in Springbok colours with his wife, Aisling, and son Eli Noah.
Munster and Healy won’t reunite until next May, on the penultimate weekend of the URC regular season.
In the meantime, Rowntree’s Munster will look to hit the ground running to ensure they’re on far surer footing by that stage of the season than was the case during Year 1.
This campaign will make for an altogether different prospect for the simple reality that trophies have a taste of ‘more’ off them.
And as well as their URC defence, another of Rowntree’s priorities in Year 2 will be to pull up a chair to the big-boy table in the Champions Cup.
The head coach is acutely aware that Europe is the lens through which Munster Rugby is truly judged, and the platform on which the club’s true legends are forged.
This is precisely why he threw his hat in the ring. This is why he has chosen to become a Munsterman.
“It’s pushed us on this summer,” he says. “It’s pushed me on, personally, and my staff. The trophy last season can’t be a one-off.
“We’ve got to move it on now and, in doing so, put a new programme together; players, coaches, how we do things.
“It’s this big machine. We’re reviewing our coaching, what we’re doing, the way we’re training. We’ve just got to keep fuelling the machine and driving it on. We can’t stand still. And you can feel that in the group.
“You can talk about targets on our back and expectancy. But you’ve seen what we can do. And we’ve got to keep getting better. Just keep getting better, quite simply.”
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'I remember thinking, "If I don't get this trophy home, it's going to end up in the Shannon"'
GRAHAM ROWNTREE REELS off a list of Irish coastal hotspots to which he gave visit during his summer break.
Among the highlights was a week spent near Enniscrone Beach in Sligo, he says.
He’s done Kinsale, Skibbereen and Baltimore but still feels he has only scratched the surface of West Cork, from where several of his Munster players hail.
His family especially adored Kerry; Waterville and Dingle receive special mentions.
“And then I’ve got a mate who’s got a place in Ballydavid”, says Rowntree, “which is just on the coast, north of Dingle.
“He owns Tigh T.P., the big bar along the waterfront.
“Now, it was full of stag dos when I was there — a load of Dubs in there, winding me up,” Rowntree smirks.
“And I’d say to them, ‘Let me just get my phone out, there . . .”
He brandishes the phone in real-time, screen facing forward. His lock-screen is a graphic of his players celebrating their 2022/23 URC title, crowned by the emboldened words: ‘CHAMPIONS: MUNSTER.’
All in all, it sounds like a summer well spent.
More recently, Rowntree continued west with his defence coach Denis Leamy and his fullback Mike Haley — to New York, which hosted this year’s 300-person-strong ‘Friends of Munster Rugby Fundraising Dinner’.
Rowntree and his wife, Nicky, stayed an extra couple of nights in the Big Apple. They watched Ireland’s World Cup pool game with Scotland in The Joyce bar at the corner of Hell’s Kitchen and The Garment District. “Bedlam,” he smiles.
They also took in a Broadway showing of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s culturally phenomenal musical about an outsider who came to a new country, assumed the role of right-hand man to the commander-in-chief, and became instrumental in a revolution…
Ah, maybe it’s tenuous.
“Well, I didn’t have a clue what was going on anyway, to be honest with you,” Rowntree laughs. “But I love rap music and the tunes, the whole thing, was absolutely incredible.”
For a fair stretch of his four years at Munster to date, Rowntree did still feel like an outsider or something close to it. Certainly, he was acutely aware of his Englishness while living in Limerick.
He was, after all, synonymous with a similarly proud rugby institution across the Irish Sea, Leicester Tigers, for whom he lined out for the entirety of his playing career.
And though he arrived at Munster in 2019 as a hugely respected coach, he had no tangible connection to his new place of work. In fact, bizarrely, considering their healthy rivalry with Leicester in the early to mid-2000s, Rowntree scarcely crossed paths with Munster at all during his 17 years as a player.
“I never even played at Thomond, funnily,” he says.
“Although there was one well-documented game between Munster and Leicester at the Millennium Stadium. . .” Rowntree begins to laugh, recalling the infamous ‘Hand of Back’ incident during Leicester’s 2002 Heineken Cup final victory over Munster.
“Crikey . . . And in my flipping first interview here, the first question was about that! It was tongue-in-cheek but I actually had to remind them that I was off the field at that time.”
More recently, though, Rowntree has found himself beginning to feel increasingly like a Munsterman.
It was bound to be the case when he took the reins from the man who brought him to the province, Johann van Graan, and assumed a more prominent role within the Munster Rugby universe.
The transition to full-blown One of their Own will likely only accelerate now that his future lies in Limerick until at least 2026.
“And it’s not even just at work,” Rowntree explains. “We even have Irish sayings at home now. ‘Grand’ is the big one, obviously, but there are more subtle examples. My wife and I joke about it — we find ourselves saying things like, ‘We’ll go out for dinner, will we?’ It’s just these little quirks that you might not even notice if you are actually Irish.”
Two of the Rowntrees’ three kids are still in Ireland: their eldest, Lily, did a stint at the Limerick Leader newspaper as a media-sales specialist and now works for an events company.
The baby, Joel, is actually a six-foot-three centre who played Junior Cup with Castletroy College earlier this year. He wore an Ireland jersey during the World Cup. “His ears are fine as well,” Rowntree says, offering a thumb towards his own war wounds.
Middle sibling Jack, meanwhile, is back in England finishing a Sports Science degree at Loughborough University.
“No, we feel very much at home here, now,” Rowntree says. “You can never be sure what the future holds in my line of work, obviously, but we are happy here.
“As we see when we get to explore Ireland, it’s a stunning country. Good people. You don’t know how lucky you are, honestly.”
Really, though, it’s Munster who have landed on their feet.
Just over 18 months ago, they were still exploring the market to fill Johann van Graan’s seat, a vacancy for which Rowntree was unabashed in expressing his interest.
It was an extremely protracted process during which Rowntree’s future at the province was unclear and his family’s future in Ireland uncertain.
Credit to Munster, who ultimately promoted from within the coach who would steer them to their first trophy since the 2010/11 Celtic League; and equal credit to them for securing the resources to complement him with his preferred coaching ticket. It transpired to be some of the province’s most astute business in years.
But from the perspective of an in-demand coach like Rowntree, why did it make sense to hang tough for the gig in the first place? And what gave him the belief that he could step up from within to revitalise a club of Munster’s stature in his first head-coaching role?
“They’re fair questions considering I’d seen first-hand the magnitude of the job and the pressure of it,” he says.
“Everyone’s looking at you. The club has an expectancy — internally, externally — to do well. And I’d already seen what that looks like, what that means to people.
“I always had aspirations to be a head coach. Always. But it’s gotta be right, y’know? That’d be the advice I’d give to any young coach: you’ve got to understand where you are in your career. You have to be right to take on a role like this. I felt I was right.
“I had a really strong feeling for the club, so I threw my hat in the ring. And it was quite a lengthy process.
“You might say I fit in well here because it’s a ‘blue-collar’ community. I would respectfully call it ‘working class’ — although maybe it’s just a different way of saying the same thing.
“I grew up with that in Leicester: people will just tell you, straight out, how they feel you’re going, whether it’s how you’re playing or how the club is going. But they’ll congratulate you as well. I get that here, good or bad, down the shops or wherever I might be.
“I mean, the emotion that I’ve received after we’ve won a trophy, particularly from the older generation of Munster fans, is quite . . . Well, it’s actually emotional, y’know? That’s the word.”
It was a long wait for those Munster elders, all of whom lived and breathed the European triumphs of 2006 and 2008 as well as the league titles in ’03, ’09 and ’11.
Equally important was that Munster’s remarkable URC victory in Cape Town in May ended what had become an interminable wait to raise silverware for legends of the province including Peter O’Mahony and Conor Murray, over whose heads the 2000s had hung as a kind of unreachable criterion for success.
More profoundly, though, there are kids across the province in Joel Rowntree’s age bracket who had no memory of Munster winning anything at all.
Last season’s remarkable road run through the URC play-offs gave the younger generation of Munster fan their first ‘miracle’, a real-life reference point outside of low-def YouTube footage.
They know now that actually, it doesn’t always have to be Leinster, and that actually, their club’s ‘Brave and Faithful’ motto is more than mere lip service.
New legacies have grown from less.
“I hope you’re right,” Rowntree smiles. “That’s certainly my intention.
“You can feel the province is ready for it, to really build that base.
“Ian Costello (head of rugby operations) put together an incredible summer programme, pulling people from all over the province so that some of these kids could get coaching three or four days a week.
“We have to get that right. There’s a massive emphasis from the club to push talent through. And I will. I, as head coach, will push through young, homegrown players. If you’re good enough, you’re old enough. I think we’ve proven that already with the likes of Alex Kendellen and Ruadhán Quinn.
“We want to make the Munster Rugby community proud of its own homegrown talent.
“It’s not for me to say we’re ‘rebuilding’ a connection, because I’m not going to cast aspersions on previous regimes and say it wasn’t there before. We’ve just changed it to what we want to do.
“The schools as well. We’ve already had a lot of the schools coaches in. We want it to be open here.”
When it comes to underage-talent recruitment, Munster’s home base of Limerick is a particularly competitive catchment area.
Chasing an unprecedented five-in-a-row, the county’s senior hurlers have become a cultural phenomenon. Hurling is well resourced on Shannonside and Limerick’s own pathways are the envy of other sports, not to mind every other hurling county in the land.
This tectonic shift in the Treaty County felt most pronounced three years ago, when St Munchin’s College graduate Paddy Kelly was the only player from Limerick in Munster’s academy. Dave Kilcoyne, meanwhile, was the only senior forward from Limerick at a club which had partly built its modern image on the shoulders of Treaty County titans like Peter Clohessy, ‘Axel’ Foley, David Wallace, Paul O’Connell and Jerry Flannery.
It became a point of mild embarrassment and, consequently, one of serious focus for Munster, who have since clawed back plenty of ground: their current academy stock has a distinctly greenish hue to it.
The Limerick senior hurlers have a new admirer in Munster’s head coach, too, albeit he’s wary of nailing his own colours to their mast given his job spec.
“John Kiely is a very good man,” Rowntree says of his local hurling counterpart. “I’ve met him a couple of times.
“He got me tickets to the Munster final, my first hurling game — 11 June, I think it was. Limerick and Clare. My God. What a game.
“I am just blown away by it as a sport. Just going there live, to the Gaelic Grounds: there’s no music, there’s one bloke in charge — no TMO. And you’ve got to attack.
“You’ve got to find space. Your mate’s 20 metres away from you, you’ve got to find him. Fast.
“But I love the purity of hurling and I’ve been invited to go and watch Limerick train, spend some time with John, which I intend to. I’ve just not had time yet but I’m a great admirer of what he’s built there.”
For the first two months of his own reign, Rowntree’s rebuild of Munster bore the hallmarks of a slow burner.
“In hindsight, maybe we changed too much, too quickly.”
Rowntree chuckles to himself: “I remember doing media, I think it was internally, and I was like, ‘Ah, I’m not reinventing the wheel. We’re just going to change a few things.’
“. . . F–n’ hell, we changed everything.
“Obviously, there was a new coaching team, which I’d done my research on. I hadn’t just brought Denis [Leamy] and Mike [Prendergast] on board because they were Munster men; I’d brought them in because I thought they were great coaches and great people.
“And I could feel it from Day 1 with them: ‘Yep.’ It was just different, and the lads could feel it too.
“It’s all about the engagement with the players. That’s all you need. And that was especially important because the way we were going to play the game was quite different to what we’d done before. But it was everything I wanted to do: I wanted to challenge teams by moving the ball. I wanted us to become a possession team — a real possession team.
“If we were going to do that, we had to up our skills. We had to up our fitness. We had to think quicker. And we only had a few weeks.”
Rattling through Munster’s five defeats from their opening seven games last season, Rowntree makes a point of noting that the margins were slender in most of them.
He would frame those losses to his players as games in which they had run out of time while enduring teething problems in his new system.
The trouble was, though, that Munster were more than a third of the way through their league campaign and their chances of qualifying for this season’s Champions Cup were becoming increasingly vulnerable to the hourglass as well.
The South Africa game at Páirc Uí Chaoimh was famously catalytic. Mike Prendergast’s multi-layered attack clicked into gear. For months, Munster didn’t look back.
They had a couple of good cracks off Toulouse in Europe and Leinster in the URC. They began to put away the teams that they were supposed to beat and even took home the four points from Ulster on New Year’s Day in what was the standout result of Rowntree’s tenure to that point.
Munster won four on the bounce from that night in Ravenhill and headed into the stop-start Six Nations window with qualification for both the URC play-offs and the Champions Cup plainly in their sights.
Then came the blip.
In their three games between 3 March and 1 April, Munster conceded 130 points: they survived a Scarlets fightback in Cork and sneaked out as 49-42 winners; they went 28-0 down to Glasgow Warriors at Thomond, eventually losing 38-26; and they got blown out of the Champions Cup by the Sharks, a flurry of late replies putting a bit of respect on a 50-35 scoreline to the South Africans.
“Blip!?” Rowntree asks, incredulous. “It was a punch in the nose.
“I can’t remember the score at half-time, I think we were leading 35-something (35-7). We were flying, playing unbelievable rugby. A few things caught up with us. Scarlets grew and grew. And a few of our young men learned some valuable lessons that night.
“And at the end of that game, unashamedly, I’ll admit that when we got that penalty on halfway, it was me who said, ‘Posts.’ And the players weren’t happy afterwards. See, our whole mantra was that we were going to play: ‘You need more than points — you need tries.’ I’d been telling them we’re always going to keep the ball on the field. We’re always going to back our fitness.
It was over three weeks before Munster faced Glasgow in their next URC fixture, which was just their third game across the seven-week international block.
Rowntree warns that such momentum-killing gaps in Munster’s calendar “won’t happen again”: he has already pencilled in a couple of friendlies for next year’s Six Nations.
All of that being said, he recalls his side’s preparation for the visit of Glasgow feeling “absolutely perfect”. Nobody was more astonished than Munster themselves when the Warriors hit them for a bonus point before half-time.
“A shocked dressing room,” Rowntree recalls. “Coaches, players, everyone.
“We had to calm things down, recalibrate. And we scored four tries in the second half but we ran out of time. That was a punch in the nose.
“And I just remember standing in the dressing room with the coaches afterwards, planning a squad to get on a plane to go to South Africa the following Monday to play the Sharks in Durban in the Champions Cup. ‘Right, who are we taking? What are we doing?’”
In the end, the Sharks blitzed Munster in the third quarter, racked up 50, and sent them out of Europe in a state approaching existential crisis.
“We came back from South Africa and we stripped our game down,” Rowntree says. “We had a good look at ourselves. We had a good three-hour meeting upstairs (at the High Performance Centre in UL). Everybody. Just hammering things out. We had a few breaks, but we just went through our game, talking about things.
“And Denis [Leamy] in particular stripped our defence back and found a few glitches.
“It was as simple as that, so we worked on correcting it.”
Munster had two games left to salvage Champions Cup qualification and squeeze into the URC post-season.
It just so happened that they were two of the most perilous away fixtures in club rugby: back to South Africa to face the Stormers, who had never lost a home URC game and were unbeaten against northern-hemisphere opposition in Cape Town; and then over to Durban for a re-run with the Sharks, who were scrapping for the same spoils as their visitors.
Rowntree’s men needed points and the likelihood was that they had a better chance of returning from Africa with a boot up their arse than with anything especially helpful to their cause.
This was serious.
“Not that the board or anyone had ever put pressure on me to this effect, but there’s a few million reasons why you want to be in Europe,” Rowntree laughs.
“The Stormers had been on the road, they’d lost to Exeter, and they had a long trip home but they were talking themselves up, saying they were going to try and beat us up early on with maul tries. And we did it to them instead.
“Our fitness came through. And we went to Durban a week after and we’re 22-3 down to the Sharks on 58 minutes, but we came back and scored three tries.”
A brilliant win and a rousing, comeback draw. Fifth place was secured, and with it both a URC quarter-final trip to Glasgow and a Champions Cup berth for the following season.
Munster were starting to punch back.
“We kept driving this thing in the group about being on the road, being battle-hardened,” Rowntree says.
“The thing is, when you’ve been to South Africa and put in two performances like that, you can go anywhere for a quarter-final with credibility. Just being coach, being in team environments, I know what that’s like, then, from Glasgow’s perspective: ‘These lads have been to South Africa and done that. They scored seven tries.’ It does have an effect.”
Another road victory followed at Scotstoun. It was aided by a Warriors red card, sure, but it was underpinned by early sets of goal-line defence the likes of which Rowntree had never seen from his team before.
“And then you’ve got a semi-final against our old mates up the road,” Rowntree smiles.
“I didn’t realise the extent of the Munster-Leinster rivalry until I got here, to be honest with you,” he says. “You don’t get it until you taste it.
Munster’s late show during the semi-final at Lansdowne Road had the Rowntree coaching ticket’s fingerprints all over it: bravery, skill, fitness, and Jack Crowley.
Even more gratifying for the head coach than his young out-half’s unflappable finish was the genesis of that decisive score.
By his own admission, Rowntree is obsessed with four-minute ’bouts’, and Munster do their over-speed training in blocks of the same duration.
Carried out at warp speed, the sessions go a little something like this: Run the ball. Pass the ball. If circumstances dictate, kick the ball. If the ball is gone for any reason, keep your head. Stay in the game. Win it back. Rinse and repeat as many times as are necessary for a positive outcome after four minutes.
In their semi-final win over Leinster, Munster kicked the ball twice after Gavin Coombes’ big turnover win deep inside his own 22′ on 75 minutes and 20-odd seconds. Crowley slotted the winner 70 yards up the pitch less than two and a half minutes later.
“It’s my most watched piece of rugby from last season, to be honest with you,” says Rowntree, who can recite all of its composite moments to near perfection.
“I’ve watched the final multiple times but I’d say that end to the semi, those last four or five minutes . . . I’ve probably watched that more. I’ll never forget that.
Munster marched on to complete the job back in Cape Town, upsetting the overtly confident Stormers for a second time in their backyard.
The wait was over. A weight was lifted. And so too was a first piece of silverware since 2011.
Incidentally, Rowntree almost spits the words when he recalls somebody asking him beforehand if the URC final was a “free shot”.
When he saw referee Andrea Piardi blow the final whistle from the coaches’ box at DHL Stadium, Munster’s head coach did not cut the figure of a man who believes in the concept of bonus territory.
That image of an instantly decompressed Rowntree, his head resting in his hands while all hell breaks loose around him, will forever be a piece of Munster’s iconography alongside the flailing arms of 1978, Donncha O’Callaghan’s Y-fronts, Peter Stringer sending Biarritz for chips in Cardiff, and the rest of the magical scenes that make up the province’s rich rugby tapestry.
Rowntree’s new-school Munster had pulled off an old-school knockout run that would have been frankly unthinkable only a couple of months earlier.
“Iconography? Is that a word?” he asks. “I obviously know ‘iconic’, but iconography . . . Jesus. Listen, I’ll take that.
“It was just absolute relief. The sheer weight of it. Just, ‘Tssscchhhhh’…” Rowntree bows his head. “You turn the tap on, release the emotion.
“It was just a pressure that we had put on ourselves. To get that far, to get a taste, to have this opportunity . . . the idea of wasting that opportunity was just unthinkable.
“I’m quite calm in the coaching box anyway and the best leaders I’ve worked with, or under, are quite calm; steely under pressure. What you are under pressure defines you and, in that circumstance, it’s a great characteristic to be calm.
“So, I try to be calm and I try to keep the rest of them calm: ‘Get down for f…’” Rowntree laughs, tugging the sleeve of the imaginary coach beside him.
“And when that maul collapsed at the end and the lads in the box first started jumping around, I’m thinking, ‘The referee’s not blown his whistle.’ You can actually see me pointing, going, ‘He’s not blown his whis– oh, he has!’” Rowntree slumps forward again, recreating the moment of release. “Just . . . emotional.”
Lips wobbled again the following Monday evening when Munster were serenaded by 10,000-plus supporters at a sun-kissed Thomond Park.
Former centre Barry Murphy, these days of Hermitage Green fame, answered the call to MC the squad’s homecoming.
“And the bloody lads had been on it since 11 o’clock in the morning, hadn’t they? Half of them couldn’t speak,” Rowntree says.
“And Barry’s freestyling it in a way that only Barry can. I love the man.
“But our media people had given him instructions: ‘Speak to Graham’ — because I was . . . sober, and ‘speak to Tadhg Beirne’, who was relatively sober. ‘Do not speak to anybody else.’
“So Barry’s got the microphone in front of 10,000 people and he’s going to John Hodnett, he’s going to Earlsy . . .” Rowntree laughs. “It was beautiful chaos.
“We ended up in Rashers pub in town at 11:30 that night. All of a sudden, it’s full of rugby fans who’d heard that we were there.
“So much for safekeeping.
“The next morning, I had to go to SuperValu to buy some glue. The top had come off it. There’s a screwable, blue top but this little inner piece had come out.”
Munster won’t fancy handing the trophy back, and not because of any light damage incurred back in May.
Their URC title defence begins with today’s visit of the Sharks to Thomond (5:15pm), for which Rowntree will be without his World Cup contingent.
His Ireland players will take several weeks off to rest tired minds and bodies and, eventually, to begin the process of reverting their focus back to the red jersey.
When they do return to Munster, however, they’ll do so a man light.
And “what a man” says Rowntree of Keith Earls, who announced his retirement from rugby following Ireland’s quarter-final exit in France.
“He battled through his injuries last season and, suddenly, in the spring, he was available to us. We had a 6-2 split against Leinster (in the URC semi-final) and we needed him to do 80 minutes, and he did. And he played exceptionally well, too. He’s tough. He’s a great man to have around.
Still in France, meanwhile, is Jean Kleyn, whose rise to the rank of test Springbok is conflicting for his club boss: on a personal level, Rowntree is proud as punch of his tighthead lock. On the professional front, though, Kleyn suddenly becoming non-Irish-qualified will bring with it complications in the medium-term.
“Just a tad,” Rowntree says, wide-eyed. “We’ll have to wait and see what the future holds in that regard.
“But what I can say is Jean had an exceptional season last season and we’re hugely proud of him as a club.
“He’s fulfilled a childhood dream there.”
Rowntree also reserves a word for newly turned Scottish international Ben Healy, with whom he remains in contact even since Healy moved to Edinburgh to launch a test career from his maternal grandparents’ home country.
“I didn’t want him to leave. Such a talent, Ben. Good kid as well, great energy. Very diligent. I was delighted for him to have gotten his test caps, and good luck to him. There are no hard feelings there at all. He’s still in touch.”
Munster and Healy won’t reunite until next May, on the penultimate weekend of the URC regular season.
In the meantime, Rowntree’s Munster will look to hit the ground running to ensure they’re on far surer footing by that stage of the season than was the case during Year 1.
This campaign will make for an altogether different prospect for the simple reality that trophies have a taste of ‘more’ off them.
And as well as their URC defence, another of Rowntree’s priorities in Year 2 will be to pull up a chair to the big-boy table in the Champions Cup.
The head coach is acutely aware that Europe is the lens through which Munster Rugby is truly judged, and the platform on which the club’s true legends are forged.
This is precisely why he threw his hat in the ring. This is why he has chosen to become a Munsterman.
“It’s pushed us on this summer,” he says. “It’s pushed me on, personally, and my staff. The trophy last season can’t be a one-off.
“We’ve got to move it on now and, in doing so, put a new programme together; players, coaches, how we do things.
“It’s this big machine. We’re reviewing our coaching, what we’re doing, the way we’re training. We’ve just got to keep fuelling the machine and driving it on. We can’t stand still. And you can feel that in the group.
“You can talk about targets on our back and expectancy. But you’ve seen what we can do. And we’ve got to keep getting better. Just keep getting better, quite simply.”
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