One of the memories that sticks out for Conor Murray, in his early days at Munster, was being in a dressing room at half-time in a Magners League game and Paul O’Connell calling a meeting.
O’Connell was not happy with how the first half went so, with head coach Tony McGahan looking on, he called the lads together and set them to rights.
Munster went out and got the job done after the break and the memory stayed with Murray. Here was a man he had idolised, growing up, getting the Munster squad together and demanding more of them, and of himself.
David Wallace played with O’Connell for over a decade and can recall many such meetings, be they at training sessions or between the four walls of the Thomond Park dressing room. Things that had to be said were said and nobody was standing on ceremony. If feelings were hurt, it was for the greater good. It was for Munster.
Wallace, who won a league title and two Heineken Cups with Munster, tells SportsJOE what it was like to play for the province when the likes of Paul O’Connell, Ronan O’Gara, Anthony Foley and more were at their peak.
“It’s massively powerful,” Wallace begins. It’s one thing with a coach talking to you, but when you’ve got your peers calling meetings in the dressing room after a loss – saying, ‘This is what we have to improve or fix’ – that is a very, very powerful thing.
“That was always part of our D.N.A. We were player-led and player-driven. I’m not saying the coach had no power – he did – but it was coming from both sides. Everyone feels ownership. It matures you too, as a player and as a person.
“I was lucky to play with Paul, Ronan, Frankie Sheehan, Mick O’Driscoll and Jerry Flannery. They were leaders on the field and leaders in the dressing room. John Hayes was mostly quiet, or he’d give you a few words. But when he spoke, he really drove it home. It was too the point and 110% correct.”
While Wallace can recall such get-togethers during games against Toulouse, Gloucester, Leinster and Ospreys, one that springs to his mind as the pure Munster mentality came in April 2013.
“I had retired the season before the Harlequins game in the European Cup,” he says, “but, from what I’ve heard, that is the one that stands out.
“The players led that one. They liked the style of play they had imposed on Harlequins in the first half. They weren’t up for deviating. That was straight out of Paul O’Connell’s playbook – lads, this is working.
“They made the big decisions on the field. They had the guts to take the flak if it didn’t work, but it did. They won a famous battle over there, that day.”
O’Gara was one of that leadership core that would stand up and let rip if he felt standards were dropping or if a point needed to be driven home.
“ROG would always be one of those lads who would call a meeting or voice concerns,” Wallace recalls of a player he first came across while he was at Crescent College and O’Gara was at Presentation, in Cork.
“I was lucky to play with ROG in the Munster Schools team and with the Irish underage sides, the Under 21s. We knew each other very well. Cres and Pres played each other quite often so I would have known him quite well.
“As a forward, it was an armchair ride to play with him. He’d rifle the ball into the opposition’s corner and he’d manage the game for us. It was like having an extra coach out on the field. Playing with him was like having a comfort blanket.
“There is nothing worse that getting up from a ruck and seeing that the ball has been kicked away aimlessly. He’d call the ball on himself and get us 40 or 50 metres up the field. You’d be thinking, ‘This is brilliant’. ROG understood that better than anyone I played with.”
That generation of players have all now retired but the dressing room meetings have not gone with them. Now it falls to the likes of Murray, Peter O’Mahony, CJ Stander or Billy Holland to get up, call the team together and ask for more of each other.
Shrinking violets don’t fare too well at Munster and ripping the piss is just as important as laying down the law.
The younger lads at Munster labelled O’Gara ‘Monty Burns’ in his latter years at the province while new signing Joey Carbery is already being called ‘ROG’ by the Munster players in the Ireland squad.
The province has recruited well for 2018/19 and they will hope to pus on past that clatter of semis and finals they have lined out for. Wallace believes Johann van Graan has assembled a squad capable of going that next step forward. If they are to get there, though, the dressing room will have to be as full-frontal and fearsome as it was in the past.
The next journey has no room for passengers.
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