PAT MURRAY. MICK Galwey. Jim Williams. Anthony Foley. Paul O’Connell. Doug Howlett. Peter O’Mahony.
Tadhg Beirne.
“The eighth person to be named as Munster captain,” says the province’s new skipper, as he mulls over Munster Rugby’s professional history.
“A huge honour for me, a huge honour for my family, for sure,” Beirne adds.
“When your name goes up alongside legends like that, you can only look at it as an achievement, for sure, y’know? I didn’t really see my name ever going up there, but to be up alongside legends like that, it’s a huge privilege.”
Full-time captaincy will be a perpetual work in progress, Beirne explains. The only real deviation from his typical game-week routine will be having to deal with the microphone more often — and his laptop, too, where Beirne will study rugby’s laws in greater detail so that he can consult with referees in-game.
The rest of it should look after itself, and it will be made easier by the fact that he still calls one of those eight great Munster names a teammate.
“I’ve Pete alongside me… He’s certainly still doing a lot of the workload in terms of leadership and speaking.
“It’s probably just within him to be a natural leader. So, I’m still learning a lot from him, and it’s very much a learning process, and hopefully, I’ve been improving game on game.
“Pete’s been a captain his whole life with probably every age grade he’s gone through, because it probably comes very naturally to him.
“Since I’ve been given the first opportunity to be captain, I’ve probably had to learn a lot and learn fast in terms of speaking, being a little bit more vocal and saying the right thing. And I certainly still don’t always say the right thing but I’m learning as fast as I can.”
O’Mahony, of course, was earmarked as a future Munster captain as far back as his schools career with Pres. Beirne’s route towards joining him on the wall has been more scenic.
The Kildare native emerged from Leinster’s academy bottleneck in the middle of the last decade but ultimately didn’t quite make the grade in the senior ranks. Talent identification is far from an exact science and, while he remains a ‘what if’ for Leinster, few could have foreseen Beirne becoming one of Test rugby’s greatest locks when he first crossed the Irish Sea to Scarlets in 2016.
Munster sealed his signature, a season in advance, after Beirne and the Welsh region put them to the sword in the 2017 Pro14 final. The Eadestown man has since won 55 Irish caps as well as two for the Lions, featuring in World Rugby’s 2022 Team of the Year.
That he is now entrusted with being the face of one of Irish sport’s most famous institutions is further reward for having the courage to take the road less travelled eight years ago.
Beirne, though, is reluctant to buy into his own mythology for the time being.
“I probably won’t until I hang up the boots and properly sit back and have a think about it all,” he says.
“I suppose it’s such a fast-moving sport because every week is a new week. You’re not really thinking about the past too much and it’s no different this week. And next week comes, and I’ll have forgotten about this week,” he smiles.
“I don’t think it’s until you probably hang up the boots and you have time to think back through all the years of playing where you do really get to appreciate the journey that you’ve been on.”
There has certainly been room for self-reflection at Munster’s High Performance Centre in Limerick this week, however.
Beirne, who will be available for selection against the Ospreys this Saturday along with his fellow Ireland internationals, says his side weren’t long making sense of their dismal defeat to Zebre.
“The obvious, isn’t it? The defence is what wasn’t up to scratch — nowhere near it really,” he says.
“Very uncharacteristic of us, especially over the last couple of years. We’ve got one of the best defences in the league over the last couple of years.
“Not just the weekend just gone, but against Connacht as well, we haven’t performed in that area at all and that was the main topic of conversation today (Tuesday) in our meeting: it was about fixing a lot of what we did in defence.
“We weren’t physical enough and we were getting our roles wrong as well. We just gave away soft tries at the end of the day.
“There were certainly a lot of areas in attack we need to fix as well. We left a lot of opportunities out there.
“It’s disappointing but in terms of how much improvement is possible from the weekend, we know we have a lot to work on but we’re not getting worried either. We’re in a good position to fix those problems this week and hit the ground running again.”
When asked whether Munster’s defensive deficiencies in Parma were attributable to system errors or a sub-standard attitude on the day, Beirne replies: “We spoke about both for sure.”
“At times, it probably was attitude in terms of wanting to be more physical”, he adds, “and at times it was just our detail around how we defend, the way in which we leaked line-breaks and stuff like that.
“A bit of both, it’s on us to fix that.
“We’ve reviewed that game now and have put it behind us. I’m sure we’ll speak on those errors again later in the week, not letting that happen again against Ospreys. But we’ve done our review and all of our focus is on to Ospreys.”
