MUNSTER VERSUS GLASGOW: This time it’s personal. Again.
Two clubs separated by 600km and a body of water, none of which runs under the bridge.
Munster and Glasgow share the best kind of sporting rivalry in that neither side was born into it.
They are your two similarly-minded friends from separate social circles whom you excitedly unite at a party only for them to ruin the whole fecking night arguing about something that nobody can remember. The following morning, neither is willing to accept even partial culpability. Congratulations, you’ll spend the rest of your life ensuring they don’t come within an ass’s roar of each other again.
Munster-Glasgow is the inverse of a boxing feud: it’s not ‘just business’ at all. It’s strictly personal.
As such, this evening’s knockout instalment in the franchise is summer-blockbuster fare, but what of the origin story?
While the saga has run for just over a decade, there’s a case to be made that the prequel could be set as far back as 2002.
Peter Clohessy would be its protagonist, a reluctant hero whose previous infractions on the rugby field would absolutely constitute a ‘checkered past’. Among its primary antagonists, meanwhile, would be future Glasgow head coach Gregor Townsend, then a player for French club Castres.
During the final moments of a European Cup pool game at Stade Pierre-Antoine, Clohessy emerged from a pile of bodies wearing a severe-looking bitemark which he alleged to have been administered by Castres’ Ivorian back row Ismaella Lassissi.
Referee Tony Spreadbury was powerless to act because he hadn’t seen the incident, and so Munster broke with tradition: for the first time in their six European Cup campaigns, the province cited an opposition player. (This is how citing used to work in rugby: official complaints were lodged by a club rather than a third-party commissioner).
However, seeking to exploit Clohessy’s reputation — on the continent, at least — as a complete antichrist, Castres counter-cited the Munster prop in an effort to spare Lassisi from an almost certain 12-month suspension. They alleged that Clohessy had racially abused Lassisi during the game, with the club’s president Pierre-Yves Revol describing the Limerick man on French radio as “provocative and a cheat”.
Clohessy was cleared of any wrongdoing. Lassissi received a year-long ban but this was later overturned on appeal.
Now, you’re probably wondering how the hell Gregor Townsend wound up becoming a baddie in this particular plot.
For that, the blame may lay squarely with Castres director Patrick Alran. He claimed during the disciplinary process that Lassissi had informed Townsend — then Castre captain — that he had been racially abused, and that the Scottish out-half had subsequently brought this to the attention of referee Spreadbury.
Castres’ whole case fell apart, however, when neither Townsend nor Spreadbury could recall any such interaction.
As for why Townsend didn’t intervene sooner, it may be that he was caught between a rock and a hard place. Later that same year, Clohessy’s close friend and teammate Mick Galwey wrote in his autobiography that after he was bitten, ‘Claw’ had referred to Lassisi’s skin colour as a means of identifying him to referee Spreadbury. “It wasn’t in any way racist or anything like that,” Galwey stressed in 2002.
One could understand if Lassissi, the sole black player on the pitch, had interpreted it through a very different lens at the time. And one would have to understand, by extension, why Lassisi’s captain would have found it a delicate situation to navigate, even in the knowledge that his club had fiddled with the chronology for their own purposes.
In any case, it didn’t sit kindly with Munster that Townsend initially remained shtoom while Clohessy, halfway through his final season as a player, stared down the barrel of what would have been a career-ending suspension. It’s unlikely, too, that Townsend emerged from the whole affair with an increased appreciation for Ireland’s southern province, who later turfed his side out at the semi-final stage of the European Cup in what would be his final season with Castres.
It’s surely no coincidence that the atmosphere between Munster and Glasgow began to turn bilious just as Townsend got his feet under the desk at Scotstoun a decade later. Consider the Munster figures who spilled over from 2002 into the early 2010s: Anthony Foley as forwards coach; Paul O’Connell, Donncha O’Callaghan, Peter Stringer and Ronan O’Gara as agenda-setters among the playing contingent. These were guys who dragged the extra few per cent out of others and if they had ever previously found themselves short of material heading into a Glasgow week, that problem was solved as soon as Townsend re-entered their periphery in 2012.
The two sides hockeyed each other at home that first season but it was Glasgow’s victory over Munster in March 2013 which proved the punctuation point: the Scots sewed it into Rob Penney’s side at Scotstoun, racking up 51 points as they all but ended Munster’s hopes of a play-off berth.
There are no prizes for guessing what happened when the sides met again in a top-of-the-table clash at the same ground just weeks into the following season — but aside from Munster inevitably dogging out a victory in an ill-tempered game, the rivalry had its first major flashpoints: scrum-halves Niko Matawalu and Conor Murray were each cited, Matawalu for allegedly biting Donncha O’Callaghan and Murray for allegedly elbowing his opposite number shortly afterwards.
O’Callaghan was magnanimous during the hearing and the independent disciplinary hearing found that “while Niko’s teeth had come into contact with Donnacha O’Callaghan’s arm, causing injury, this contact was accidental and therefore not an act of foul play”. Sure enough, Murray was also cleared as the sides appeared to settle outside of rugby’s mock court.
The crux of the rivalry at this point, though, was that Glasgow were a bloody good side and Munster didn’t especially like it.
While the proud southern province began to slip down European rugby’s pecking order, Townsend’s crowd of upstarts across the Irish Sea appeared to be moving in the opposite direction.
The sands shifted entirely across two seasons in the mid-2010s. In May 2014, three-time losing semi-finalists Glasgow sold out Scotstoun for the first time and edged out Munster by a single point in a ferocious Pro12 semi-final. They went on to lose to Leinster in the decider but they went one better the following year when Leone Nakawara put Munster to the sword at Ravenhill and inspired Warriors to their first and only major trophy.
Glasgow had become a decidedly better team than Munster by 2015. The Irish province would have known as much even when Ian Keatley’s 77th-minute penalty eked out a two-point league victory over the Scots at Thomond Park five months later; Warriors had been left without 21 players who were on World Cup duty, Munster just six.
Both teams were decidedly back to full complement when they met at Thomond Park on 22 October 2016, the day after Axel Foley’s funeral. Munster, absolutely possessed, flipped the conflict on its head, and the fallout from Keith Earls’ similar actions towards Glasgow hooker Fraser Brown only amplified the ill feeling between the sides that pervaded even this delicate occasion.
During the early throes of an epochal Champions Cup pool game, Munster captain Peter O’Mahony and his Warriors counterpart, Jonny Gray, were summoned together by referee Jerome Garces who pleaded for calm after a bout of handbags.
Gray made the case to Garces that Munster were “too emotional”. Under Garces’ gaze, O’Mahony shoved Gray in the chest. “Don’t fucking tell us what emotions we should have!” he said.
Describing O’Mahony’s role in the occasion, Donncha O’Callaghan would later describe it as “the day we all saw our little brother grow up”. O’Mahony certainly grew to hate Glasgow, and his frosty relationship with Scottish rugby at large can likely be traced back to that fiery day in Limerick.
But Jonny Gray had probably made a pertinent point even if O’Mahony felt it had been articulated crassly: Munster’s resounding victory that day is made even more famous for the fact that they achieved it while playing with 14 men for 62 minutes after Earls uncharacteristically blew a fuse.
Earls didn’t go quietly from the field and he later doubled down, accusing Brown of milking the incident to get him sent off. It was a claim which sparked fury throughout Glasgow’s whole organisation. Indeed, ask 10 Warriors supporters today and seven of them — give or take — will tell you their disdain for Munster begins with Keith Earls.
The Ireland wing’s public retraction and apology that December was brutal in its honesty but it frankly came too late to mend that particular bridge. The news cycle had long since moved on.
The power dynamic between the two clubs, though, had tilted dramatically back in Munster’s favour. Fraser Brown himself recently remarked that the best All Blacks team of the last 20 years wouldn’t have beaten Munster in that Axel game. His side had been left shellshocked.
They went back to the frontline, though, for the return pool-stage fixture at Scotstoun in January 2017.
Munster had only a couple of points to spare in another vicious battle, and their scrum-half had a point to raise in its aftermath.
Conor Murray, by that stage a world leader in his position, was “properly pissed off” as he alleged that Glasgow deliberately tried to injure him by targeting his standing leg on multiple occasions as he delivered his inch-perfect box-kicks. Glasgow maintained that Murray didn’t have a leg to stand on.
Match footage shows that Murray was certainly hit after playing the ball on at least 10 occasions. Several of them were legal Glasgow hits. A few more were either borderline or late. A couple of them absolutely posed a significant danger to his front leg, regardless of intent. But only one contact was penalised by referee Luke Pearce, and that was whistled only because Glasgow eight Josh Strauss had played Murray from the ground.
Munster were fuming. Glasgow head coach Gregor Townsend, meanwhile, leant on Pearce’s officiating as evidence that his side had simply put the nine under “legitimate pressure”.
Townsend, already back in Munster’s bad books having earlier in the season taken issue with Jacques Nienaber’s then-novel role as a water-carrier, went on to suggest that Munster had created a noise to distract from the fact that the province had allowed Murray to continue playing despite his appearing out cold after a heavy head collision with Tim Swinson.
It’s worth noting, however, that both Munster and Murray himself flagged Glasgow’s heavy-handedness long in advance of the scrum-half’s head injury; Munster forwards coach Jerry Flannery even pointed it out during a mid-game interview on Sky Sports. (Separately, if Murray took a head knock like that in 2024, there is no way he would have been allowed to play on).
The only Glasgow player to have ever suggested that his side went out to inflict a serious leg injury on Murray is Ryan Wilson, who is enough of a ‘character’ that his willingness to nod along to the accusations should be taken with a pinch of salt. Indeed, on the BBC Scotland rugby podcast earlier this week, Fraser Brown sounded exasperated as he clarified that former teammate Wilson is simply trying to wind up Munster fans in his refusal to deny that Glasgow had targeted Murray’s standing leg.
The recently retired Wilson, a bona fide legend at Scotstoun, understands exactly his role in the pantomime. He is to Munster the unbearable prick that Peter O’Mahony is to Glasgow and beyond.
The tensions between the two sides became so fraught after January 2017 that, when Simon Zebo later followed back Wilson on Instagram out of sheer politeness, he got such abuse from Murray, O’Mahony and Andrew Conway that he had to immediately unfollow the Scotland back row.
Zebo and Wilson shared a laugh about it on a RugbyPass podcast in 2020 but four years later, you can be almost sure that Peter O’Mahony doesn’t yet see the funny side.
In the years since The Standing Leg game, Munster and Glasgow’s snarling rivalry has continued to spit out such iconic scenes as Rory Scannell’s last-minute winner at Thomond Park in October 2018, Glasgow’s obliteration of Munster at the same ground last March, and Munster’s stunning act of revenge as they rolled the credits on the Scots’ season on their way to the URC title just over 12 months ago.
That play-off encounter was Glasgow’s only defeat at Scotstoun last term and they played three quarters of it with 14 men. They’ll feel they have unfinished business when they land into Thomond this evening.
Munster will be keen to remind them that it’s not business at all.
