FOR ALL THAT he is an emotive public speaker, Graham Rowntree’s post-match interview with Jean de Villiers following Munster’s infuriating defeat to the Stormers a fortnight ago still struck a curious chord such was the intensity with which it was delivered to the TV cameras.
“I’ve just said to the lads in there, we’re going to stick together now, be strong,” Rowntree said. “We’ll own up to the stuff we’re not doing but I’m not having us fall apart.”
To intimate that this Munster side could fall apart at all was jarring. Rowntree seemed more alarmed even than the province’s fans back in Ireland, who had watched his side fight their way out of tighter corners during the Englishman’s tenure.
This is not hindsight: even at the time, Rowntree’s interview a fortnight ago felt like the first public admission from Munster’s head coach that a few threads had come loose at the seam.
That he twice stressed to De Villiers that “we’ll be better than that” — even after the former Springbok had attempted to end the interview and wish him well for the following weekend’s meeting with the Sharks — would suggest Rowntree still felt there was a chance that he could turn things around.
Perhaps victory in Durban would have been encouragement enough for those ideologically opposed parties in Munster’s dressing room to compromise and collaborate and let sleeping dogs lie, as they seem to have been able to do at various junctures over the last 12 months. But a sleeping dog will wake up eventually.
Munster were brought for their walkies by the Sharks and this time, Rowntree’s post-match interview was about as flat as any he had carried out during this two years in charge.
He might have suspected then what his players would learn on a Zoom call with Munster CEO Ian Flanagan during their day off on Tuesday, and what the rest of us would learn half an hour later.
Maybe there was even a degree to which Rowntree embraced the idea of a clean break.
Former Munster head coach Graham Rowntree speaking in South Africa. Steve Haag Sports / EJ Langner/INPHO
Steve Haag Sports / EJ Langner/INPHO / EJ Langner/INPHO
We don’t know exactly how things passed the point of no return on that South Africa tour; we just know that they did.
Munster have declined to elaborate — out of respect to a highly successful former employee, yes, but also because of the non-disclosure agreements that tend to accompany the ‘mutual consenting’ of any professional coach.
It grates, though, that there isn’t even a party line on Rowntree’s departure four days later. There has been no official reason given at all, either in Tuesday’s original club statement or during Thursday’s press conference with interim head coach Ian Costello, whose task was unenviable.
The fans who will pack Thomond Park to capacity for today’s visit of an All Blacks fringe squad deserve more than to be left with a vacuum of information in which complete bollocksology from social media can soon become canon.
It’s been pointed out, for example, that none of Munster’s current senior squad have thanked Rowntree on Instagram for a tenure which yielded the province’s first trophy win in 11 years, the only trophy most of those players have ever won.
But their silence on social media means nothing. Exposure to the internet has warped our brains into believing you need to be seen to do something in order to have done it. In reality, most players will flick a text to a departing coach to whom they’re grateful or, if they’re over 30, they might even give them a buzz on the phone.
Granted, it would be common for a player to also express their appreciation for a coach publicly, just as Diarmuid Barron did of Rowntree in embargoed quotes from Thursday’s presser which have been published this morning.
But otherwise, where there might not be a consensus on the matter in the dressing room and where your employer is handling the matter delicately, it would be only wise for a player to keep their sentiment private for the time being.
You may have noticed on Friday, for example, that Andrew Conway, unaffected by any of these complications having retired this time last year, thanked Rowntree profusely on his Instagram story. “Will always be grateful to Wig for the kindness and selflessness in my last few weeks with Munster,” wrote the former Ireland wing. “I won’t forget it. Thanks Wig.”
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The contributions of Barron and Conway were indicative of the reality that Rowntree was absolutely a popular figure among plenty of players. The apparent tension with senior figures in the dressing room was not universal.
But it did exist. Rowntree’s training regime is high-octane and physically intense. It demands huge personal sacrifice. It was undeniably central to the southern province’s exhilarating URC title win in 2023.
It’s been well cited at this stage that some of Munster’s players and coaches no longer fully subscribed to it. Call that professional disagreement but when the point of conflict is so fundamental to the job, the power dynamic will nearly always shift towards those who are risking their physical safety to complete it.
By the sounds of it, this caused malaise rather than mutiny. But malaise is the kind of thing that will see you ship six tries to Zebre. Untreated, it will turn to rot.
A few key personal relationships deteriorated, too, long before Parma.
And one of the first changes Munster should apply to the new regime, however it eventually takes shape, is to lessen the head coach’s role in contract negotiations.
Whereas the more business-experienced Guy Easterby, Bryn Cunningham and Tim Allnutt take the lead on such matters at the other three provinces, Rowntree was more central to the process at Munster. Be it part of his job spec or because of his old-school personal values, he often took it upon himself to deliver bad news to a player’s face.
His intentions in doing so may have been honourable but honour goes out the window in a conflict zone, which is precisely what that room is when a player is being advised to explore other options.
Peter O’Mahony was not alone in taking exception to how his future at the province — or, as it seemed at one point last November, lack thereof — was communicated to him.
Munster prepare to face New Zealand XV at Thomond Park. Laszlo Geczo / INPHO
Laszlo Geczo / INPHO / INPHO
On the other side of the table, Rowntree would be within his rights to point to the shit-storm that was inflicted upon him when Munster were forced to cut their budget by a million euro at the same time as two of the province’s greatest ever players were coming off IRFU central contracts.
It may have even made sense initially for Munster to drive on without O’Mahony and Murray but not after one of them was named Ireland captain and the other remained an invaluable test player, hence why the IRFU ultimately supplemented their new Munster deals.
The national union could also surely have made an exception to their NIQ rules in the case of RG Snyman and Jean Kleyn, the latter of whom became non-Irish qualified in circumstances that are never likely to be replicated.
These were messes not of Munster’s making, per se, but it was their head coach who was handed the doggy-poop bag.
And much the same as any workplace, a rugby player’s sympathy will typically lie with hard-working colleagues whose futures are either in limbo for months or, in Snyman’s case, ended abruptly. The boss is usually the bad guy.
On that very human level, a thought should equally be spared for Rowntree whose family’s medium-term plans have been torn up after they embedded themselves in Limerick for five years.
The Englishman’s youngest son Joel, for example, played Junior Cup for Castletroy in 2023. Whereas Rowntree’s Munster contract was scheduled to keep his family Shannonside beyond his son’s Leaving Cert, any new rugby role in the meantime might dictate that Joel has to leave his friend group and take on a new school curriculum during his senior cycle.
Rugby coaching is a rough gig for the whole family, and never more so than when it ends.
Rowntree will remain out of work only for as long as suits him and his loved ones. Whatever about his modern-day Munster miracle in Cape Town in 2023, his side’s top-placed finish and semi-final defeat last season might have been a slight overachievement in its own context.
Europe wasn’t great, sure, but d’you know who wouldn’t care about that? The vast majority of clubs in Europe.
The organic connection he forged with Munster’s fans will precede him should he ever choose to go down that road again. There will be easier gigs presented to him, too, but Rowntree has plenty of room for more tattoos.
Rowntree posing with the URC trophy in 2023. James Crombie / INPHO
James Crombie / INPHO / INPHO
For Munster, then, the next step feels more important than merely appointing the right man in Rowntree’s place. This is an opportunity to rearrange their whole coaching structure. They should make use of it.
As Ronan O’Gara laid it out so painfully in his Irish Examiner column on Friday, coaching Munster is no longer among the premium roles in world rugby but it’s still an absolute beast of a job. And maybe that’s half the problem.
Rowntree wore it well but it must have also worn him down to some degree. Munster’s head coach is less a rugby coach and more a tribal elder who gets pulled and dragged throughout the province’s extended universe, showing face and shaking hands and doing favours. Even the sanctity of his office can be infiltrated by matters as trivial as having to choose the colour scheme for his side’s training gear for the following season, the kind of thing that would drive a man spare when he’s trying to prepare for a trip to Swansea.
He ostensibly oversees the entire rugby branch, not to mind the 60-odd people who work for him daily.
Spinning all of these plates while living among a fanbase as engaged as Munster’s brings with it a pressure that has only two measures: extreme and unbearable.
Even simply to make it more appealing to high-profile candidates, Munster should decentralise the role and, just as they did in 2016, hand off a few of those plates to a director of rugby, allowing the head coach to further focus on the meat and veg.
The IRFU must acknowledge this reality and facilitate the change, even if it means shelling out an extra few hundred grand. If you demand that a province cut corners with their squad and rely more on youth, you can’t then scrimp on the coaches tasked with nurturing and turning that talent into meaningful senior players. Such an approach will yield only a cycle of mediocrity.
It may well be the case that Mike Prendergast, or a tandem between him and Denis Leamy, would be the optimal fit to take charge of a squad which broadly seems aligned with their coaching ideals. Internal promotions would hardly break the bank. But as Ronan O’Gara suggested in his column, a third figure with longer roots in coaching would significantly strengthen their efforts.
It would be irresponsible not to sound out Felix Jones, whose areas of expertise extend beyond the defensive roles in which he has excelled with the Springboks and, most recently, England.
At the very least, this should strike the IRFU as an opportunity to pilfer some of the intellectual property Jones has gathered from two rival, elite setups.
The former fullback is seeing out a notice period with the RFU during which he is effectively working from home, providing tactical analysis to Steve Borthwick and tailoring individual training plans for players. His recruitment would require a buy-out of the final months of his contract but the English union may be more amenable to ridding him from their books if he’s not joining a direct test competitor.
There is no evidence to suggest Jones even wants a head-coaching role (the same can be said for Prendergast and Leamy, for that matter) but as an ex-player and coach of Munster’s, it’s believed he still has a strong affinity for the club irrespective of his sudden exit alongside Jerry Flannery in 2019.
That Declan Kidney’s name has also been proposed by Donal Lenihan and Donncha O’Callaghan would suggest that the two-time Heineken Cup winner is also interested in a reunion with his native province.
Graham Rowntree, Declan Kidney (then London Irish DOR) and Ian Costello at Musgrave Park before a pre-season game in 2022. Ben Brady / INPHO
Ben Brady / INPHO / INPHO
It would be easy to mistake that proposition for an inevitably doomed nostalgia blast akin to Kenny Dalglish’s return to manage Liverpool in 2011. Kidney, though, is closer in profile to Brian Kerr in that he remains as immersed in the Munster rugby ecosystem now as he was during his glittering spell in charge.
The 65-year-old is said to still have an extensive knowledge of virtually every current club and school team in the province despite only last year returning from England where he had been director of rugby at London Irish since 2018. In that sense, he could prove a potentially valuable conduit between the coaching group, the board, and grassroots.
But most crucially, Munster need someone who can manage upwards to 10 Lansdowne Road, where purses are loosened and tightened and dreams of signing an NIQ front row typically go to die.
Kidney, the quasi-psychologist who coached the IRFU’s current head of high performance David Humphreys between 2002 and 2004, strikes as being better equipped than most to go to bat for Munster’s cause.
Whatever the case, interim coach Ian Costello is a talented enough individual that he should buy adequate time for Munster’s professional games committee — on which he’s a non-voting invitee — and David Humphreys to piece together a structure that will drive Munster forward.
In lieu of answers about the last couple of weeks, there is no excuse but to find a solution for the future.
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Most of the solution might be in the building, but Munster must think outside the coaching box
FOR ALL THAT he is an emotive public speaker, Graham Rowntree’s post-match interview with Jean de Villiers following Munster’s infuriating defeat to the Stormers a fortnight ago still struck a curious chord such was the intensity with which it was delivered to the TV cameras.
“I’ve just said to the lads in there, we’re going to stick together now, be strong,” Rowntree said. “We’ll own up to the stuff we’re not doing but I’m not having us fall apart.”
To intimate that this Munster side could fall apart at all was jarring. Rowntree seemed more alarmed even than the province’s fans back in Ireland, who had watched his side fight their way out of tighter corners during the Englishman’s tenure.
This is not hindsight: even at the time, Rowntree’s interview a fortnight ago felt like the first public admission from Munster’s head coach that a few threads had come loose at the seam.
That he twice stressed to De Villiers that “we’ll be better than that” — even after the former Springbok had attempted to end the interview and wish him well for the following weekend’s meeting with the Sharks — would suggest Rowntree still felt there was a chance that he could turn things around.
Perhaps victory in Durban would have been encouragement enough for those ideologically opposed parties in Munster’s dressing room to compromise and collaborate and let sleeping dogs lie, as they seem to have been able to do at various junctures over the last 12 months. But a sleeping dog will wake up eventually.
Munster were brought for their walkies by the Sharks and this time, Rowntree’s post-match interview was about as flat as any he had carried out during this two years in charge.
He might have suspected then what his players would learn on a Zoom call with Munster CEO Ian Flanagan during their day off on Tuesday, and what the rest of us would learn half an hour later.
Maybe there was even a degree to which Rowntree embraced the idea of a clean break.
We don’t know exactly how things passed the point of no return on that South Africa tour; we just know that they did.
Munster have declined to elaborate — out of respect to a highly successful former employee, yes, but also because of the non-disclosure agreements that tend to accompany the ‘mutual consenting’ of any professional coach.
It grates, though, that there isn’t even a party line on Rowntree’s departure four days later. There has been no official reason given at all, either in Tuesday’s original club statement or during Thursday’s press conference with interim head coach Ian Costello, whose task was unenviable.
The fans who will pack Thomond Park to capacity for today’s visit of an All Blacks fringe squad deserve more than to be left with a vacuum of information in which complete bollocksology from social media can soon become canon.
It’s been pointed out, for example, that none of Munster’s current senior squad have thanked Rowntree on Instagram for a tenure which yielded the province’s first trophy win in 11 years, the only trophy most of those players have ever won.
But their silence on social media means nothing. Exposure to the internet has warped our brains into believing you need to be seen to do something in order to have done it. In reality, most players will flick a text to a departing coach to whom they’re grateful or, if they’re over 30, they might even give them a buzz on the phone.
Granted, it would be common for a player to also express their appreciation for a coach publicly, just as Diarmuid Barron did of Rowntree in embargoed quotes from Thursday’s presser which have been published this morning.
But otherwise, where there might not be a consensus on the matter in the dressing room and where your employer is handling the matter delicately, it would be only wise for a player to keep their sentiment private for the time being.
You may have noticed on Friday, for example, that Andrew Conway, unaffected by any of these complications having retired this time last year, thanked Rowntree profusely on his Instagram story. “Will always be grateful to Wig for the kindness and selflessness in my last few weeks with Munster,” wrote the former Ireland wing. “I won’t forget it. Thanks Wig.”
The contributions of Barron and Conway were indicative of the reality that Rowntree was absolutely a popular figure among plenty of players. The apparent tension with senior figures in the dressing room was not universal.
But it did exist. Rowntree’s training regime is high-octane and physically intense. It demands huge personal sacrifice. It was undeniably central to the southern province’s exhilarating URC title win in 2023.
It’s been well cited at this stage that some of Munster’s players and coaches no longer fully subscribed to it. Call that professional disagreement but when the point of conflict is so fundamental to the job, the power dynamic will nearly always shift towards those who are risking their physical safety to complete it.
By the sounds of it, this caused malaise rather than mutiny. But malaise is the kind of thing that will see you ship six tries to Zebre. Untreated, it will turn to rot.
A few key personal relationships deteriorated, too, long before Parma.
And one of the first changes Munster should apply to the new regime, however it eventually takes shape, is to lessen the head coach’s role in contract negotiations.
Whereas the more business-experienced Guy Easterby, Bryn Cunningham and Tim Allnutt take the lead on such matters at the other three provinces, Rowntree was more central to the process at Munster. Be it part of his job spec or because of his old-school personal values, he often took it upon himself to deliver bad news to a player’s face.
His intentions in doing so may have been honourable but honour goes out the window in a conflict zone, which is precisely what that room is when a player is being advised to explore other options.
Peter O’Mahony was not alone in taking exception to how his future at the province — or, as it seemed at one point last November, lack thereof — was communicated to him.
On the other side of the table, Rowntree would be within his rights to point to the shit-storm that was inflicted upon him when Munster were forced to cut their budget by a million euro at the same time as two of the province’s greatest ever players were coming off IRFU central contracts.
It may have even made sense initially for Munster to drive on without O’Mahony and Murray but not after one of them was named Ireland captain and the other remained an invaluable test player, hence why the IRFU ultimately supplemented their new Munster deals.
The national union could also surely have made an exception to their NIQ rules in the case of RG Snyman and Jean Kleyn, the latter of whom became non-Irish qualified in circumstances that are never likely to be replicated.
These were messes not of Munster’s making, per se, but it was their head coach who was handed the doggy-poop bag.
And much the same as any workplace, a rugby player’s sympathy will typically lie with hard-working colleagues whose futures are either in limbo for months or, in Snyman’s case, ended abruptly. The boss is usually the bad guy.
On that very human level, a thought should equally be spared for Rowntree whose family’s medium-term plans have been torn up after they embedded themselves in Limerick for five years.
The Englishman’s youngest son Joel, for example, played Junior Cup for Castletroy in 2023. Whereas Rowntree’s Munster contract was scheduled to keep his family Shannonside beyond his son’s Leaving Cert, any new rugby role in the meantime might dictate that Joel has to leave his friend group and take on a new school curriculum during his senior cycle.
Rugby coaching is a rough gig for the whole family, and never more so than when it ends.
Rowntree will remain out of work only for as long as suits him and his loved ones. Whatever about his modern-day Munster miracle in Cape Town in 2023, his side’s top-placed finish and semi-final defeat last season might have been a slight overachievement in its own context.
Europe wasn’t great, sure, but d’you know who wouldn’t care about that? The vast majority of clubs in Europe.
The organic connection he forged with Munster’s fans will precede him should he ever choose to go down that road again. There will be easier gigs presented to him, too, but Rowntree has plenty of room for more tattoos.
For Munster, then, the next step feels more important than merely appointing the right man in Rowntree’s place. This is an opportunity to rearrange their whole coaching structure. They should make use of it.
As Ronan O’Gara laid it out so painfully in his Irish Examiner column on Friday, coaching Munster is no longer among the premium roles in world rugby but it’s still an absolute beast of a job. And maybe that’s half the problem.
Rowntree wore it well but it must have also worn him down to some degree. Munster’s head coach is less a rugby coach and more a tribal elder who gets pulled and dragged throughout the province’s extended universe, showing face and shaking hands and doing favours. Even the sanctity of his office can be infiltrated by matters as trivial as having to choose the colour scheme for his side’s training gear for the following season, the kind of thing that would drive a man spare when he’s trying to prepare for a trip to Swansea.
He ostensibly oversees the entire rugby branch, not to mind the 60-odd people who work for him daily.
Spinning all of these plates while living among a fanbase as engaged as Munster’s brings with it a pressure that has only two measures: extreme and unbearable.
Even simply to make it more appealing to high-profile candidates, Munster should decentralise the role and, just as they did in 2016, hand off a few of those plates to a director of rugby, allowing the head coach to further focus on the meat and veg.
The IRFU must acknowledge this reality and facilitate the change, even if it means shelling out an extra few hundred grand. If you demand that a province cut corners with their squad and rely more on youth, you can’t then scrimp on the coaches tasked with nurturing and turning that talent into meaningful senior players. Such an approach will yield only a cycle of mediocrity.
It may well be the case that Mike Prendergast, or a tandem between him and Denis Leamy, would be the optimal fit to take charge of a squad which broadly seems aligned with their coaching ideals. Internal promotions would hardly break the bank. But as Ronan O’Gara suggested in his column, a third figure with longer roots in coaching would significantly strengthen their efforts.
It would be irresponsible not to sound out Felix Jones, whose areas of expertise extend beyond the defensive roles in which he has excelled with the Springboks and, most recently, England.
At the very least, this should strike the IRFU as an opportunity to pilfer some of the intellectual property Jones has gathered from two rival, elite setups.
The former fullback is seeing out a notice period with the RFU during which he is effectively working from home, providing tactical analysis to Steve Borthwick and tailoring individual training plans for players. His recruitment would require a buy-out of the final months of his contract but the English union may be more amenable to ridding him from their books if he’s not joining a direct test competitor.
There is no evidence to suggest Jones even wants a head-coaching role (the same can be said for Prendergast and Leamy, for that matter) but as an ex-player and coach of Munster’s, it’s believed he still has a strong affinity for the club irrespective of his sudden exit alongside Jerry Flannery in 2019.
That Declan Kidney’s name has also been proposed by Donal Lenihan and Donncha O’Callaghan would suggest that the two-time Heineken Cup winner is also interested in a reunion with his native province.
It would be easy to mistake that proposition for an inevitably doomed nostalgia blast akin to Kenny Dalglish’s return to manage Liverpool in 2011. Kidney, though, is closer in profile to Brian Kerr in that he remains as immersed in the Munster rugby ecosystem now as he was during his glittering spell in charge.
The 65-year-old is said to still have an extensive knowledge of virtually every current club and school team in the province despite only last year returning from England where he had been director of rugby at London Irish since 2018. In that sense, he could prove a potentially valuable conduit between the coaching group, the board, and grassroots.
But most crucially, Munster need someone who can manage upwards to 10 Lansdowne Road, where purses are loosened and tightened and dreams of signing an NIQ front row typically go to die.
Kidney, the quasi-psychologist who coached the IRFU’s current head of high performance David Humphreys between 2002 and 2004, strikes as being better equipped than most to go to bat for Munster’s cause.
Whatever the case, interim coach Ian Costello is a talented enough individual that he should buy adequate time for Munster’s professional games committee — on which he’s a non-voting invitee — and David Humphreys to piece together a structure that will drive Munster forward.
In lieu of answers about the last couple of weeks, there is no excuse but to find a solution for the future.
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