MUNSTER DEFENCE COACH Denis Leamy says his former teammate Donncha O’Callaghan was “completely on the money” with his scathing assessment of the southern province’s 42-33 URC defeat to Zebre in Parma last Saturday.

Speaking in RTÉ’s studio following Munster’s six-try loss to last season’s bottom side, O’Callaghan said of the Reds’ display that “the amount of errors, the amount of poor performances, the amount of individual sloppy mistakes was just totally unacceptable,” adding that Munster “should be embarrassed” by their display.

And defence coach Leamy was in full agreement with his fellow Munster legend as he continues to prepare his side for a response against the Ospreys at Musgrave Park this Saturday.

“Someone said that he’d had a go and I specifically went home and watched it,” Leamy said of O’Callaghan’s comments. “And Donncha was completely on the money.

“I know Donncha since I was 18. I’ve nothing but respect for him. He was like a brother to me when we played together.

Donncha O’Callaghan said nothing that we don’t know, that the players don’t know, that we didn’t feel.

“Does it hurt?” Leamy asked himself aloud. “I think the hurt comes from how we were on Saturday.

“We want to remember the legacy that people like Donncha created here and we want to build on that. And when someone like Donncha honestly calls out our actions at the weekend, you put your hands up and you say, ‘We have to do better. It wasn’t good enough.’

“We’re not going to step away from that, either. Donncha O’Callaghan will always be a legend here and he said nothing on Saturday that we didn’t say ourselves.”

Leamy was unforgiving in his own assessment of Munster’s defensive display at the Stadio Sergio Lanfranchi, albeit the former Ireland back row stressed on several occasions that he believes Munster’s players are of the character that they will put it right this Saturday.

He highlighted several inconsistencies in Munster’s performance against Zebre, as well as areas in which they fell short of their own standards.

Top of his list, however, was that they simply didn’t meet the Italians hard enough in the collision, a reality which hasn’t been lost on Graham Rowntree’s side this week.

“We need to tighten up, y’know? When teams launch against us, we need to tighten up,” Leamy said.

“How we kick, how we control the kicking game… If we’re gonna go off, if we’re gonna stay on, we need to stick to the plan, y’know?

“And honestly, then… Honestly, like, we need to present a huge amount more physicality.

“And that, in terms of Saturday, was was probably for me quite disappointing. Our physical exchanges just weren’t good enough.

“It’s definitely been a difficult couple of weeks,” the defence coach added. “Absolutely, 100%, we need to be an awful lot better than we were. That’s absolutely [the case].

“Standing in front of the lads this morning, the disappointment on their faces is still very palpable there, and you get a sense for how much they care.

“And that’s a great thing as a coach. You’re looking for your reaction. You’re watching body language, and, y’know, their disappointment is definitely evident. The big thing now is we have to energize them again.

“The reality is within the room, there’s a standard that we expect and we didn’t meet it on Saturday.”

Part of the solution, Leamy explains, is reminding Munster’s players how they’ve become one of the top defences in the URC over the last two seasons. He insists that very little in his defence has changed from a structural standpoint and that improvement will instead come from better application.

But that they have shipped over 100 points in their last three games — including their pre-season defeat to Gloucester — is not an unprecedented trend, even if it is uncharacteristic.

Between March and April 2023, in what transpired to be their URC title-winning campaign, Munster shipped 130 combined points in three games to Scarlets, Glasgow and the Sharks.

There were caveats to each performance: they buried a beloved figure in Tom Tierney two days before the Scarlets game, there was a three-week gap to the Glasgow defeat, and both Durban and the Sharks proved too hot on a short week of long travel.

But upon their return from South Africa, Munster’s coaches and players had a three-hour meeting in which they hit a reset button, stripped their game down, and laid the foundations for a run which eventually yielded a URC title.

As such, Leamy has been here before, most of Munster’s players have too, and the defence coach is steadfast in his belief that this recent sequence of games will similarly prove an anomaly.

“Look, we’re blessed with this bunch of players,” Leamy said.

“As a defence coach, more often than not, these guys go to war for us. There are very fixable things that are within our control that can nullify a huge amount that went wrong for us on Saturday.

“So, it’s not something that scares us. In actual fact, the challenge inspires us. We’re sitting in the meeting room this morning… these are the moments in your career [that define you]. You look back to that golden Munster era. There were definitely moments like this. It was full of moments like this.

And the boys, y’know, I’ve said it to them this morning: they’re the best group of players I’ve worked with defensively. They’re the best group of guys I’ve worked with. They’ll do anything for you. They’ll go to war for you consistently.

“There’s nothing we’ll ask them to do that they haven’t done before. It’s just about all those little bits and pieces.

“For a team to score a try against you, you need about five or six things to go wrong. Now, that may not be evident to the passing rugby fan but when we look in detail, there are five to six things that have gone wrong before a team scores.

“If we control one or two of those little bits, we stop those tries.”