WHEN TIME ALLOWS it, a few minutes’ small-talk will usually follow an interview with a sportsperson, and particularly one as sociable as Leinster back row Will Connors.
After hitting the ‘stop’ button on my voice recorder back in April, I asked Connors if he had been selected for Leinster’s upcoming tour of South Africa, the squad for which was due to be announced publicly a day or two later.
He said he was on standby. He’d been told to pack a bag and await confirmation. He’d find out in the next couple of hours, he reckoned.
I presumed to a player of Connors’ experience — and particularly given his big-game role last season, with Leinster’s Champions Cup semi-final against Northampton Saints awaiting them on their return — that the upheaval of a South African tour in between would be an absolute dose.
Connors instantly disabused me of that notion. He was crossing his fingers that he wouldn’t have to put his passport back in the drawer. He was dying to go to South Africa with the lads.
Qualifying it with the reality that he had fewer responsibilities at home than several older teammates, he made a point that I hadn’t previously considered: a two-week tour with friends and colleagues is an exceptionally rare thing, not only in more conventional walks of life but in professional rugby, too.
Until the South African franchises joined the URC in 2021, only test players from the league’s composite nations ever got the chance to spend uninterrupted time together in longer blocks, either in pre-tournament training camps or during the summer window down south.
Connors enthused that Leinster’s annual South African trip was perceived by most of the players involved to be one of the highlights of the season: a chance to get to know some lads who you’d usually see only during work hours, a chance to tighten existing bonds with others, and a chance to challenge yourself professionally in a country that is as interesting culturally as it is aesthetically beautiful. What’s not to like?
Anyway, he didn’t get the call in the end. Balls. But Connors did reshape in my head the concept of cross-hemispheric travel in the URC. I would have presumed that the cost, distance, and disruption to training made it a pain in the arse for everyone except the fans, for whom the South African dimension has revitalised a run-of-the-mill competition. But Connors reckoned that the majority of his peers at the provinces — at least those not leaving behind children — actively look forward to their fortnight-long team retreat. Let the suits and the coaches sweat the rest of it.
If such an attitude indeed pervades among the Munster squad in Cape Town, this week might have been exactly the optimal slot in their calendar to fly south for a couple of weeks and break up the routine after a bad day at the office.
There can be no questioning the togetherness of Graham Rowntree’s side, who stood up well to their first-quarter beating at the hands of Leinster and fired a few hooks off the ropes for the remaining nine rounds.
They’ll feel the dice was cast against them at Croke Park, not least in the form of the 14-man fiasco for which the URC’s head of officials, Tappe Henning, apologised to Rowntree over the phone on Monday. On a surface level, they’d be correct, of course. Shit happens, and a fair bit of it definitely happened to Munster last Saturday evening.
Their travel schedule this week may have precluded them from digging beneath the surface of their defeat and sometimes, that’s just as well. The reasons for Leinster’s superiority last weekend run deep but the wound doesn’t need to. Let it scab over and walk it off. Christmas at Thomond Park doesn’t be long creeping up on you in any case.
Really, Rowntree can even frame this Stormers gameweek in Cape Town to his side as ‘the real start’ to Munster’s season should he so choose. The first month has brought with it about a season’s worth of insanity and only in the last couple of weeks have Munster been able to work with something even vaguely resembling their first-choice 23.
That their best defender, Shane Daly, is among the reliable faces to have returned from injury from this tour will imbue that sense of returning normality, as will the presence of a driving force in Alex Kendellen who is among the Emerging Ireland contingent to have linked up with the squad upon their arrival in Cape Town.
Also… it’s Cape Town. Munster were the first URC team from the north to beat the Stormers at DHL Stadium and they’re the only team to have done it twice. To the brave and faithful, Cape Town is just Swansea with a few nicer walks.
If they need galvanising at all, Munster will surely find it in the realisation that roughly the same group of players pulled off one of the province’s greatest triumphs in the same spot less than 18 months ago. And while today’s visitors to DHL Stadium haven’t quite reached the same pitch since, their hosts are bang out of tune.
John Dobson’s Stormers, champions in 2022 and finalists in 2023, have so far this season resembled a tribute act to their former selves.
Gratned, that they currently prop up the URC table can be dismissed: the Stormers have played only three games and, let’s face it, Zebre’s Round 2 max-pointer over Munster warped the order of things in the bottom half.
Incidentally, the Stormers whacked the Italians in Parma a week later but to either side of that win, they shipped almost 80 combined points away to the Ospreys and Edinburgh.
Head coach Dobson has this week stressed that those defeats did not occur for want of effort by his players but one of the unwritten tenets of the United Rugby Championship is that if you’re getting the crap beaten out of you by Edinburgh, things have gone seriously arseways somewhere.
That said, the Stormers of the URC era have rarely made sense. Take last season as a snapshot: they had a scarcely believable disregard for the ball and yet they had the most effective kick chase in terms of ball retention in the whole league. They won more scrum penalties than any other side and yet their scrum success rate on their own ball was — and remains — a fairly ordinary 83%. And Dobson’s devil-may-care team of madmen actually conceded the third fewest tries of any side in 2023/24.
But their defence is taking on water this term and Munster, who are so far averaging nine clean breaks a game to the Stormers’ six, will fancy their chances of punching further holes in the framework at DHL Stadium later today.
This will be the Stormers’ first home game since June and they have openly stressed their need to buck a few trends, not least a four-game losing run against Munster. That they’re four-point favourites against their definitive bogey team feels kind, but the Ospreys back in April are the only visiting team of the last nine to beat the Stormers in Cape Town.
The men in red, meanwhile, have lost none of their last nine against South African franchises in the URC and are unbeaten in their last five in the Rainbow Nation.
After an up-and-down opening month, this feels like an opportunity for Rowntree’s men to put the foot down and get the show on the road.
Stormers: Warrick Gelant; Suleiman Hartzenberg, Ruhan Nel, Dan du Plessis (capt), Leolin Zas; Damian Willemse, Paul de Wet; Sti Sithole, Joseph Dweba, Neethling Fouche; Adre Smith, JD Schickerling; Marcel Theunissen, Ben-Jason Dixon, Keke Morabe.
Replacements: Andre-Hugo Venter, Brok Harris, Sazi Sandi, Ruben van Heerden, Dave Ewers, Louw Nel, Herschel Jantjies, Jurie Matthee.
Munster: Mike Haley; Calvin Nash, Tom Farrell, Alex Nankivell, Shane Daly; Jack Crowley, Conor Murray; Jeremy Loughman, Niall Scannell, John Ryan; Jean Kleyn, Tadhg Beirne (capt); Tom Ahern, Alex Kendellen, Jack O’Donoghue.
Replacements: Eoghan Clarke, Kieran Ryan, Stephen Archer, Fineen Wycherley, Ruadhán Quinn, Ethan Coughlan, Billy Burns, Seán O’Brien.
Referee: Mike Adamson (SRU).
