THE FORECAST WAS grim, the meteorologists predicting rain, sports reporters a deluge of Australian tries.
Everyone got it wrong. The previous Saturday, on the opening game of their tour, Australia had beaten Leinster 38-11. What chance then had Munster, a team made up of bank officials, electricians, sales reps and brickies?
That was a question the Munster players asked themselves the night before. One by one they spoke, each taking it in turns to outline what it meant to wear the red jersey, some articulating a sense of place, others a sense of fear. “It was the most emotional gathering I ever had in rugby terms,” said Paul McCarthy, the Munster prop.
There was a good reason for that. Rugby, in 1992, was still an amateur sport, thereby anyone who sat in that Munster team meeting in the Mardyke did so out of duty rather than because a pay cheque was coming as soon as the chat was over.
They were all born in the province, all aware of what had gone before, with the old Munster teams who had defeated Australia in 1967 and 1981, the All Blacks in 1978.
“We were very realistic,” McCarthy says, “and knew that huff and puff would only take us so far. We had to play smart as well as hard.
“So at the meeting I spoke about the challenges I knew I’d face because it was my first time playing loosehead and Dan Crowley and Ewen McKenzie were two of the best tightheads on the planet. I knew I’d need help.”
“You’ll be grand; we’re there for you, Macker.”
Those were Mick Galwey’s words.
The big Kerryman was 26 in 1992, had already spent five years in a Munster shirt but was still in the spring of his career. This bitter October afternoon would be his first day of summer. A year later he’d score the winning try for Ireland against England; become a British and Irish Lion. Then came a four-in-a-row with Shannon at a time when winning the All-Ireland League (AIL) meant something.
And still the biggest adventure of all had yet to start, Munster’s quest to conquer Europe. The inspiration for that journey began this week 30 years ago.
**
Peter Stringer was ball boy for that Australia game, Ronan O’Gara a face in the crowd. Donncha O’Callaghan was also standing in the terrace behind the posts, one of thousands of schoolkids who’d got tickets for the princely sum of £1.
The game was fixed for a Wednesday afternoon, fueling bitterness within the Munster squad. “As soon as I heard the schedule,” Galwey recalls, “it was a case of thinking, ‘hang on a minute here, how come we’re not considered good enough to play your Saturday team, your first XV?’ That annoyed me.”
Bob Dwyer didn’t distinguish between firsts and seconds. Australia’s World Cup winning coach had Don King-esque qualities when it came to hyping things up. “Our midweek side is as good as our weekend one,” he said in advance of the tour. “We can go unbeaten.”
He’d earned the right to talk that way. The previous year they’d won the World Cup. A couple of months earlier, they’d embarked on a four-game tour of South Africa and averaged 22-point wins, including a 26-3 victory in the Test. They had won five of their previous seven meetings against the All Blacks, doing so with a marriage of flair and fight. “The game was evolving,” recalls Brian Walsh, Munster’s centre that day, “and they were the innovators. The rest of the world tried to copy them.”
On this day, though, Munster decided to do something different.
First, they talked about the scrum. “We had a silent call for it,” Galwey says, still guarding the details of it as if it were protected under The Official Secrets Act. McCarthy is more forthcoming about their lineout policy for Australia’s throws. “We just didn’t see the point in gifting them time and space,” he recalls. “Basically we wanted to close the gap and frustrate the hell out of them.”
They did that, alright. Throwing the ball in that day was a young Queensland student called David Nucifora, now the IRFU’s high performance director. Watching old, grainy footage of the match on YouTube, you can see Nucifora’s agitation growing as the match wears on.
“It was obvious several members of the Australian No 2 team went missing when Munster began to apply overwhelming physical pressure,” wrote The Sydney Morning Herald the following day.
“Munster’s tactics of kicking up-and-unders and hassling Australia into error was not aesthetic football, but it was highly effective.
“The provincial side simply wanted to win far more.”
Munster hassled Troy Coker from the off. Billy Stickland / INPHO
Billy Stickland / INPHO / INPHO
While this suggests Munster bossed things, the truth is somewhat different. Yes, they had their moments – a penalty try following a five-metre scrum being the best of them – but the reality is they were 19-10 down at half-time and still trailing late into the second half.
Advertisement
“As a tight forward, you’re involved in a game within a game,” says McCarthy. “A turning point for us as a team, and a pack, was when we went for a pushover. The noise levels got a little bit more after that score. They were getting anxious.”
They were also getting fiery. Enraged when Crowley, their prop, had to leave the field to receive 11 stitches for a head wound, the Wallabies also had to nurse Warwick Waugh, their big second row, whose cheek, according to the Herald, ‘got in the way of a boot during a maul’.
Late on, with five minutes to go, Galwey and Australia lock, Garrick Morgan, were sent off for their part in a 20-man brawl. “I’m innocent,” said Morgan afterwards. “I was on the ground, I wasn’t fighting; it was just like a big hug.”
From Galwey’s perspective, the ‘hug’ was neither tender nor romantic. “I was no saint. It was probably the case of the ref picking out two biggest lads; the two of us were rolling around on the ground, you couldn’t really say it was handbags. There’s an old saying, though, if you get sent off, make sure you take one of theirs with you.”
In this respect, he was successful. In any case, it wasn’t Galwey who Wallaby coach Dwyer singled out afterwards but Peter Clohessy. “A disgrace,” Dwyer said of the Munster tighthead.
Then again Dwyer said a lot of things, so much so that when the English Daily Telegraph profiled Clohessy a decade later, ahead of his 50th Irish cap, they referenced that day in Musgrave Park.
“Bob Dwyer was not a man who readily accepted that opposition sides could legitimately score more points than his team,” wrote Brendan Gallagher.
“That day was a typically rugged, robust and memorable Munster triumph, with leather and fists flying on both sides. Clohessy was no more guilty than the next man but world champions are not supposed to lose against a hastily assembled Irish provincial XV. There had to be a reason, an excuse, and Dwyer rounded on Clohessy.”
A legend formed. Peter Clohessy had morphed into The Claw.
“The tragedy is that people often overlook what a fantastic rugby player Claw is,” said Keith Wood a decade after the Musgrave Park win. “Quick, hard, strong, able to prop either side of the scrum. As a friend, he’s the best. Fantastically loyal.”
David Nucifora (centre) captained Australia. Billy Stickland / INPHO
Billy Stickland / INPHO / INPHO
Yet Dwyer had him tagged as ‘a disgrace’ and the words of a World Cup winning coach carried weight. “Despite everything Dwyer said, he ended up playing for Queensland, so explain that one to me,” says Walsh. “The fact is they respected him.”
This is Galwey: “The scrum was King to Claw. He was a hard man and a brilliant operator – one of the first to go from tighthead to loosehead. Of course there was a bit of madness but you needed that madness for life in the front row.
“I’d also make the point that Australia in 1992 had a pretty mean pack, themselves. They were no saints let me tell you. (Munster out half) Dan Larkin had to go off with concussion.”
That injury, inadvertently, brought Jim Galvin onto the pitch. We’ll come back to him in a moment. First there is another story to tell.
**
If sport was defined by logic then Munster/Australia would have stayed to script. The touring Wallabies, who were full-time in all but name, would have won and Paul McCarthy would have returned to his job as an electrician the following day with scars, emotional as well as physical.
Galwey would have been back on the road as a sales rep for the building company he worked for; Walsh would have been behind the counter in a Cork bank and 30 years on these men of autumn wouldn’t be talking about their days of summer.
But sport is unscripted. In this madcap world, Buster Douglas knocks out Mike Tyson in 1990; Western Samoa defeat Wales in 91; the Danes win Euro 92. And that same year a team with just six Ireland internationals found a way to defeat an Australian squad touted as the finest to have played the game.
Here’s how. At the previous night’s meeting at the Mardyke, a pact was struck. “I’d say most of us had a fear and it wasn’t of Australia being world champions, it was of letting your mates down,” says McCarthy.
“The honour bestowed on you to represent Munster; you didn’t want to let down the jersey. The previous wins over Australia, the All Blacks win in 1978, you had to look into the history; you had to understand it.
“We spoke about the guys who had been before us. We rubber stamped the notion that this was our time; that defeat wasn’t going to happen on our watch, that we would avoid being turned over.
“Nobody said as much, but we had a bit of a fear, and that drove us.”
If channelled the wrong way, fear can be an energy sapper. With Munster teams, in ’78, ’92 and then the Noughties, it became a fuel.
“You’ve got to remember the time and the place,” says Walsh. “So, this was 1992, deep into the third season of the AIL. When that competition began, people said it was between two teams, Ballymena and Wanderers. Yet (Cork) Con won the first one, Garryowen the second, then (Young) Munsters, Garryowen, then Shannon.
“Those games were intense, every single one of them. So we were all used to pressure. That prepped us for the Australia game.”
Munster won the battle up front. Billy Stickland / INPHO
Billy Stickland / INPHO / INPHO
From a distance of 30 years, it would be easy to dismiss Walsh’s words given the status of the AIL now in comparison to provincial rugby. Back in 1992, though, the gap in standard was much less significant. More to the point, the AIL easily trumped the provincial scene in terms of prestige.
“I remember a Cork Con/Garryowen game,” says McCarthy, “and so many people being there that some fans climbed trees to gain a suitable vantage point. That day, as we went to scrum down, we heard this screech. A guy had fallen off a branch. That was the madness that surrounded those matches. So, in terms of being battle hardened for the big days, yeah the AIL prepared you alright.”
That’s the context for what followed, Munster staying in touch through that penalty try and Charlie Haly’s boot, coming from nine points down to level it up late on, prior to Galwey and Morgan’s red cards.
Five minutes were still on the clock, enough time for Galvin – the unexpected replacement – to nail a winning drop goal with one of the final kicks of the game.
That wasn’t the end of the drama, though. No, Dwyer saw to that, proving to be world class at whinging as well as coaching. “It was a shambles of a match,” he told reporters afterwards. “We were beaten because we didn’t show the right discipline to win.
“Our involvement in that fight was further evidence of lack of discipline. We were just poor.”
Australia’s vice-captain, Anthony Herbert, was equally miffed, telling the Sydney Morning Herald that Munster reminded him of a ‘typical French side, as they are good cheap-shot merchants’.
It didn’t take long for Galwey, Walsh and McCarthy to hear the comments. “When someone else told the world how bad (you had behaved) well back then it was a badge of honour,” laughs Galwey.
This is McCarthy: “It kind of flagged that we had achieved something.”
Walsh’s take on events is beautifully succinct. “We enjoyed their bitterness.”
**
Given his position in Irish Rugby now, it’s fitting that Nucifora reacted differently, praising Munster’s performance at the post-match banquet, saying they deserved their win, before being one of six Australians to join their Munster opponents in a Cork niteclub later that evening. “He was good company, gracious,” says Walsh.
“I’d come across him again when we played them in 2010,” says McCarthy, who was then Munster’s scrum coach at a time when Nucifora worked as Australian team manager. “It was 18 years on but it was as if it was just 18 days since we played, the two of us reminiscing about the game. He was a gentleman.”
Galwey too has bumped into the Australian several times. “I just smile,” he says, “and David knows what that smile means. To be fair to him, he’s only ever praised us for what we did that day. He was a tough competitor, a good leader, and when it was over, he shook your hand and accepted the result.”
**
Years passed and on the surface it looked as though 1992 was just one of those outliers like the previous wins over touring sides. It took three years before Munster won their next interprovincial championship and while several of the ’92 team played in their first European Cup campaign, really it was just Claw and Galwey who survived to map the journey around Europe in 99/2000.
“I still think 1992 was a starting point,” says Galwey now.
Others are more certain. “It definitely was,” said O’Callaghan, when he was asked about the game in 2007. “My brother brought me to the match and we were standing down in the corner where the pushover try was. I remember watching that, thinking, I want to be out there some day.
“Then, when I got the jersey, I always thought, I’m borrowing this for 80 minutes. I know that sounds mad but every second had to count.”
That’s the legacy of ’92. The baton of ’67, ’78, ’81 was carried into another decade.
For Galwey, despite everything he went on to achieve, it remains one of his greatest days. “Technically we are the world champions now,” he joked in the dressing room afterwards. McCarthy too remembers saying they’d got a result that would be remembered in 30 years time.
He was right. It has aged well.
Get instant updates on your province on The42 app. With Laya Healthcare, official health and wellbeing partner to Leinster, Munster and Connacht Rugby.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Close
13 Comments
This is YOUR comments community. Stay civil, stay constructive, stay on topic.
Please familiarise yourself with our comments policy
here
before taking part.
A brawl, a Wallaby whinge and a legendary win – the time Munster beat the world champions
THE FORECAST WAS grim, the meteorologists predicting rain, sports reporters a deluge of Australian tries.
Everyone got it wrong. The previous Saturday, on the opening game of their tour, Australia had beaten Leinster 38-11. What chance then had Munster, a team made up of bank officials, electricians, sales reps and brickies?
That was a question the Munster players asked themselves the night before. One by one they spoke, each taking it in turns to outline what it meant to wear the red jersey, some articulating a sense of place, others a sense of fear. “It was the most emotional gathering I ever had in rugby terms,” said Paul McCarthy, the Munster prop.
There was a good reason for that. Rugby, in 1992, was still an amateur sport, thereby anyone who sat in that Munster team meeting in the Mardyke did so out of duty rather than because a pay cheque was coming as soon as the chat was over.
They were all born in the province, all aware of what had gone before, with the old Munster teams who had defeated Australia in 1967 and 1981, the All Blacks in 1978.
“We were very realistic,” McCarthy says, “and knew that huff and puff would only take us so far. We had to play smart as well as hard.
“So at the meeting I spoke about the challenges I knew I’d face because it was my first time playing loosehead and Dan Crowley and Ewen McKenzie were two of the best tightheads on the planet. I knew I’d need help.”
“You’ll be grand; we’re there for you, Macker.”
Those were Mick Galwey’s words.
The big Kerryman was 26 in 1992, had already spent five years in a Munster shirt but was still in the spring of his career. This bitter October afternoon would be his first day of summer. A year later he’d score the winning try for Ireland against England; become a British and Irish Lion. Then came a four-in-a-row with Shannon at a time when winning the All-Ireland League (AIL) meant something.
And still the biggest adventure of all had yet to start, Munster’s quest to conquer Europe. The inspiration for that journey began this week 30 years ago.
**
Peter Stringer was ball boy for that Australia game, Ronan O’Gara a face in the crowd. Donncha O’Callaghan was also standing in the terrace behind the posts, one of thousands of schoolkids who’d got tickets for the princely sum of £1.
The game was fixed for a Wednesday afternoon, fueling bitterness within the Munster squad. “As soon as I heard the schedule,” Galwey recalls, “it was a case of thinking, ‘hang on a minute here, how come we’re not considered good enough to play your Saturday team, your first XV?’ That annoyed me.”
Bob Dwyer didn’t distinguish between firsts and seconds. Australia’s World Cup winning coach had Don King-esque qualities when it came to hyping things up. “Our midweek side is as good as our weekend one,” he said in advance of the tour. “We can go unbeaten.”
He’d earned the right to talk that way. The previous year they’d won the World Cup. A couple of months earlier, they’d embarked on a four-game tour of South Africa and averaged 22-point wins, including a 26-3 victory in the Test. They had won five of their previous seven meetings against the All Blacks, doing so with a marriage of flair and fight. “The game was evolving,” recalls Brian Walsh, Munster’s centre that day, “and they were the innovators. The rest of the world tried to copy them.”
On this day, though, Munster decided to do something different.
First, they talked about the scrum. “We had a silent call for it,” Galwey says, still guarding the details of it as if it were protected under The Official Secrets Act. McCarthy is more forthcoming about their lineout policy for Australia’s throws. “We just didn’t see the point in gifting them time and space,” he recalls. “Basically we wanted to close the gap and frustrate the hell out of them.”
They did that, alright. Throwing the ball in that day was a young Queensland student called David Nucifora, now the IRFU’s high performance director. Watching old, grainy footage of the match on YouTube, you can see Nucifora’s agitation growing as the match wears on.
“It was obvious several members of the Australian No 2 team went missing when Munster began to apply overwhelming physical pressure,” wrote The Sydney Morning Herald the following day.
“Munster’s tactics of kicking up-and-unders and hassling Australia into error was not aesthetic football, but it was highly effective.
“The provincial side simply wanted to win far more.”
While this suggests Munster bossed things, the truth is somewhat different. Yes, they had their moments – a penalty try following a five-metre scrum being the best of them – but the reality is they were 19-10 down at half-time and still trailing late into the second half.
“As a tight forward, you’re involved in a game within a game,” says McCarthy. “A turning point for us as a team, and a pack, was when we went for a pushover. The noise levels got a little bit more after that score. They were getting anxious.”
They were also getting fiery. Enraged when Crowley, their prop, had to leave the field to receive 11 stitches for a head wound, the Wallabies also had to nurse Warwick Waugh, their big second row, whose cheek, according to the Herald, ‘got in the way of a boot during a maul’.
Late on, with five minutes to go, Galwey and Australia lock, Garrick Morgan, were sent off for their part in a 20-man brawl. “I’m innocent,” said Morgan afterwards. “I was on the ground, I wasn’t fighting; it was just like a big hug.”
From Galwey’s perspective, the ‘hug’ was neither tender nor romantic. “I was no saint. It was probably the case of the ref picking out two biggest lads; the two of us were rolling around on the ground, you couldn’t really say it was handbags. There’s an old saying, though, if you get sent off, make sure you take one of theirs with you.”
In this respect, he was successful. In any case, it wasn’t Galwey who Wallaby coach Dwyer singled out afterwards but Peter Clohessy. “A disgrace,” Dwyer said of the Munster tighthead.
Then again Dwyer said a lot of things, so much so that when the English Daily Telegraph profiled Clohessy a decade later, ahead of his 50th Irish cap, they referenced that day in Musgrave Park.
“Bob Dwyer was not a man who readily accepted that opposition sides could legitimately score more points than his team,” wrote Brendan Gallagher.
“That day was a typically rugged, robust and memorable Munster triumph, with leather and fists flying on both sides. Clohessy was no more guilty than the next man but world champions are not supposed to lose against a hastily assembled Irish provincial XV. There had to be a reason, an excuse, and Dwyer rounded on Clohessy.”
A legend formed. Peter Clohessy had morphed into The Claw.
“The tragedy is that people often overlook what a fantastic rugby player Claw is,” said Keith Wood a decade after the Musgrave Park win. “Quick, hard, strong, able to prop either side of the scrum. As a friend, he’s the best. Fantastically loyal.”
Yet Dwyer had him tagged as ‘a disgrace’ and the words of a World Cup winning coach carried weight. “Despite everything Dwyer said, he ended up playing for Queensland, so explain that one to me,” says Walsh. “The fact is they respected him.”
This is Galwey: “The scrum was King to Claw. He was a hard man and a brilliant operator – one of the first to go from tighthead to loosehead. Of course there was a bit of madness but you needed that madness for life in the front row.
“I’d also make the point that Australia in 1992 had a pretty mean pack, themselves. They were no saints let me tell you. (Munster out half) Dan Larkin had to go off with concussion.”
That injury, inadvertently, brought Jim Galvin onto the pitch. We’ll come back to him in a moment. First there is another story to tell.
**
If sport was defined by logic then Munster/Australia would have stayed to script. The touring Wallabies, who were full-time in all but name, would have won and Paul McCarthy would have returned to his job as an electrician the following day with scars, emotional as well as physical.
Galwey would have been back on the road as a sales rep for the building company he worked for; Walsh would have been behind the counter in a Cork bank and 30 years on these men of autumn wouldn’t be talking about their days of summer.
But sport is unscripted. In this madcap world, Buster Douglas knocks out Mike Tyson in 1990; Western Samoa defeat Wales in 91; the Danes win Euro 92. And that same year a team with just six Ireland internationals found a way to defeat an Australian squad touted as the finest to have played the game.
Here’s how. At the previous night’s meeting at the Mardyke, a pact was struck. “I’d say most of us had a fear and it wasn’t of Australia being world champions, it was of letting your mates down,” says McCarthy.
“The honour bestowed on you to represent Munster; you didn’t want to let down the jersey. The previous wins over Australia, the All Blacks win in 1978, you had to look into the history; you had to understand it.
“We spoke about the guys who had been before us. We rubber stamped the notion that this was our time; that defeat wasn’t going to happen on our watch, that we would avoid being turned over.
“Nobody said as much, but we had a bit of a fear, and that drove us.”
If channelled the wrong way, fear can be an energy sapper. With Munster teams, in ’78, ’92 and then the Noughties, it became a fuel.
“You’ve got to remember the time and the place,” says Walsh. “So, this was 1992, deep into the third season of the AIL. When that competition began, people said it was between two teams, Ballymena and Wanderers. Yet (Cork) Con won the first one, Garryowen the second, then (Young) Munsters, Garryowen, then Shannon.
“Those games were intense, every single one of them. So we were all used to pressure. That prepped us for the Australia game.”
From a distance of 30 years, it would be easy to dismiss Walsh’s words given the status of the AIL now in comparison to provincial rugby. Back in 1992, though, the gap in standard was much less significant. More to the point, the AIL easily trumped the provincial scene in terms of prestige.
“I remember a Cork Con/Garryowen game,” says McCarthy, “and so many people being there that some fans climbed trees to gain a suitable vantage point. That day, as we went to scrum down, we heard this screech. A guy had fallen off a branch. That was the madness that surrounded those matches. So, in terms of being battle hardened for the big days, yeah the AIL prepared you alright.”
That’s the context for what followed, Munster staying in touch through that penalty try and Charlie Haly’s boot, coming from nine points down to level it up late on, prior to Galwey and Morgan’s red cards.
Five minutes were still on the clock, enough time for Galvin – the unexpected replacement – to nail a winning drop goal with one of the final kicks of the game.
That wasn’t the end of the drama, though. No, Dwyer saw to that, proving to be world class at whinging as well as coaching. “It was a shambles of a match,” he told reporters afterwards. “We were beaten because we didn’t show the right discipline to win.
“Our involvement in that fight was further evidence of lack of discipline. We were just poor.”
Australia’s vice-captain, Anthony Herbert, was equally miffed, telling the Sydney Morning Herald that Munster reminded him of a ‘typical French side, as they are good cheap-shot merchants’.
It didn’t take long for Galwey, Walsh and McCarthy to hear the comments. “When someone else told the world how bad (you had behaved) well back then it was a badge of honour,” laughs Galwey.
This is McCarthy: “It kind of flagged that we had achieved something.”
Walsh’s take on events is beautifully succinct. “We enjoyed their bitterness.”
**
Given his position in Irish Rugby now, it’s fitting that Nucifora reacted differently, praising Munster’s performance at the post-match banquet, saying they deserved their win, before being one of six Australians to join their Munster opponents in a Cork niteclub later that evening. “He was good company, gracious,” says Walsh.
“I’d come across him again when we played them in 2010,” says McCarthy, who was then Munster’s scrum coach at a time when Nucifora worked as Australian team manager. “It was 18 years on but it was as if it was just 18 days since we played, the two of us reminiscing about the game. He was a gentleman.”
Galwey too has bumped into the Australian several times. “I just smile,” he says, “and David knows what that smile means. To be fair to him, he’s only ever praised us for what we did that day. He was a tough competitor, a good leader, and when it was over, he shook your hand and accepted the result.”
**
Years passed and on the surface it looked as though 1992 was just one of those outliers like the previous wins over touring sides. It took three years before Munster won their next interprovincial championship and while several of the ’92 team played in their first European Cup campaign, really it was just Claw and Galwey who survived to map the journey around Europe in 99/2000.
“I still think 1992 was a starting point,” says Galwey now.
Others are more certain. “It definitely was,” said O’Callaghan, when he was asked about the game in 2007. “My brother brought me to the match and we were standing down in the corner where the pushover try was. I remember watching that, thinking, I want to be out there some day.
“Then, when I got the jersey, I always thought, I’m borrowing this for 80 minutes. I know that sounds mad but every second had to count.”
That’s the legacy of ’92. The baton of ’67, ’78, ’81 was carried into another decade.
For Galwey, despite everything he went on to achieve, it remains one of his greatest days. “Technically we are the world champions now,” he joked in the dressing room afterwards. McCarthy too remembers saying they’d got a result that would be remembered in 30 years time.
He was right. It has aged well.
Get instant updates on your province on The42 app. With Laya Healthcare, official health and wellbeing partner to Leinster, Munster and Connacht Rugby.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Legends Munster